AI boom may not have positive outcome, warns UK competition watchdog

People should not assume a positive outcome from the artificial intelligence boom, the UK's competition watchdog has warned, citing risks including a proliferation of false information, fraud and fake reviews as well as high prices for using the technology. The Competition and Markets Authority said people and businesses could benefit from a new generation of AI systems but dominance by entrenched players and flouting of consumer protection law posed a number of potential threats. The CMA made the warning in an initial review of foundation models, the technology that underpins AI tools such as the ChatGPT chatbot and image generators such as Stable Diffusion. The emergence of ChatGPT in particular has triggered a debate over the impact of generative AI – a catch-all term for tools that produce convincing text, image and voice outputs from typed human prompts – on the economy by eliminating white-collar jobs in areas such as law, IT and the media, as well as the potential for mass-producing disinformation targeting voters and consumers. The CMA chief executive, Sarah Cardell, said the speed at which AI was becoming a part of everyday life for people and businesses was "dramatic", with the potential for making millions of everyday tasks easier as well as boosting productivity – a measure of economic efficiency, or the amount of output generated by a worker for each hour worked.