Apple CEO Urges Caution As AI Stays in Spotlight

It was another busy week for artificial intelligence (AI).

As noted in a Saturday (May 6) Seeking Alpha report, the technology continued to capture the attention of Wall Street, with both the CEO of Apple and the head of the Federal Trade Commission expressing concerns.

Per the report, Apple chief executive Tim Cook used his company’s earnings call last week to plead with companies to exercise caution as they race to add AI to their products.

He said that the potential for AI is “huge” and that his company — which has added artificial intelligence into services such as its iPhone and Apple Watch crash and fall-detection technology — would introduce AI on a “very thoughtful basis.”

Meanwhile, FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan called for immediate regulation of AI in a New York Times op-ed last week.

“Can [the U.S.] continue to be the home of world-leading technology without accepting race-to-the-bottom business models and monopolistic control that locks out higher quality products or the next big idea? Yes — if we make the right policy choices,” Khan said.

Her words followed a joint statement from the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the FTC and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) last month stressing that any decisions made by AI tools must follow U.S. law.

“Existing legal authorities apply to the use of automated systems and innovative new technologies just as they apply to other practices,” the joint release said.

And as noted here, AI tools will increasingly factor into every aspect of daily life and most facets of a business.

“As ongoing digitization transforms the world’s key experiential touch points into ever-more data-rich environments, this situation will only compound,” PYMNTS wrote.

It’s why European lawmakers want regulators to have greater authority over AI companies, and even Microsoft’s chief economist Google’s “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton recently warned of the technology’s risks.

“When enforcing the law’s prohibition on deceptive practices, we will look not just at the fly-by-night scammers deploying these tools but also at the upstream firms that are enabling them,” Khan wrote.

What are the threats that have people like Hinton — who resigned from Google — showing regrets about their life’s work?

The chief concerns deal with AI’s ability to create fake news and impersonate people, along with the risk of it amplifying the biases or inaccuracies present in the data they were trained on.

As Erik Duhaime, co-founder and CEO of data annotation provider Centaur Labs, told PYMNTS last week: “The algorithm is only as good as the data that it’s trained on.”