Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Leaders of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday the agency would pursue companies who misuse artificial intelligence to violate laws against discrimination or be deceptive. The sudden popularity of Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT this year has prompted calls for regulation amid concerns around the world about the possible use of the innovation for wrongdoing even as companies are seeking ways to use it to enhance efficiency. In a congressional hearing, FTC Chair Lina Khan and Commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya were asked about concerns that recent innovation in artificial intelligence, which can be used to produce high quality deep fakes, could be used to make more effective scams or otherwise violate laws. FTC Chair Lina Khan testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 21, 2021.

Artificial Intelligence poses both risks and rewards, but developers should be weary of technologies that could threaten "scary" outcomes, AI technologist says. The capacity of artificial intelligence systems to learn things even when they aren't explicitly taught those things will pose a significant challenge both to the companies creating and marketing these tools, and federal regulators tasked with protecting consumers who use them, a member of the Federal Trade Commission predicted. "Personally, and I say this with respect, I do not see the existential threats to our society that others do," FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya said in recent speech made available this week. "Yet when you combine these statements with the unpredictability and inexplicability of these models, the sum total is something that we as consumer protection authorities have never reckoned with." Bedoya was speaking to the International Association of Privacy Professionals about the tendency of generative AI systems to pick up knowledge and intuition about subjects even when programmers aren't focusing on those topics.

In many cases, federal agents can request access to state DMV records by filling out a form. This is an example of a Homeland Security request that was made to the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles in 2017. In many cases, federal agents can request access to state DMV records by filling out a form. This is an example of a Homeland Security request that was made to the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles in 2017. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents mine millions of driver's license photos for possible facial recognition matches -- and some of those efforts target undocumented immigrants who have legally obtained driver's licenses, according to researchers at Georgetown University Law Center, which obtained documents related to the searches.

This week we learned that ICE has searched millions of American driver's license photos, using facial recognition tools; the aim - to look for immigrants who are in this country illegally. Now privacy rights supporters and immigration advocates are calling for more transparency and oversight. But as NPR's Joel Rose reports, some version of all this has happened once before. JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Dozens of protesters gathered in Manhattan yesterday outside the office of a tech company that's growing but still unknown to many Americans. UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: You hear that, Palantir?

Amazon touts its Rekognition facial recognition system as "simple and easy to use," encouraging customers to "detect, analyze, and compare faces for a wide variety of user verification, people counting, and public safety use cases." And yet, in a study released Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union, the technology managed to confuse photos of 28 members of Congress with publicly available mug shots. Given that Amazon actively markets Rekognition to law enforcement agencies across the US, that's simply not good enough. The ACLU study also illustrated the racial bias that plagues facial recognition today. "Nearly 40 percent of Rekognition's false matches in our test were of people of color, even though they make up only 20 percent of Congress," wrote ACLU attorney Jacob Snow.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. As Facebook confronts a lawsuit over how it collects and uses biometric data, the social network is notifying more users about new facial recognition features that may infringe upon their privacy. Many people who logged onto Facebook this week were greeted with a News Feed alert detailing the new tools available through facial recognition software. Some people are receiving a notification saying that the "setting is on," while for others, it says "the setting is off." It's possible that the difference has to do with existing settings the user had selected.

Reacting to concerns about the mass collection of photographs in police databases, U.S. lawmakers plan to introduce legislation to limit the use of facial recognition technology by the FBI and other law enforcement organizations. The FBI and police departments across the country can search a group of databases containing more than 400 million photographs, many of them from the drivers' licenses of people who have never committed a crime. The photos of more than half of U.S adults are contained in a series of FBI and state databases, according to one study released in October. Law enforcement agencies don't need a court-ordered warrant to search the database, members of the House of Representataties Oversight and Government Reform Committee noted during a hearing Wednesday. Yet, the facial recognition system spits out false positive results about 15 percent of the time, with inaccuracies higher when police search for African-Americans and other racial minorities, critics said.

Search giant Google announced Wednesday that it would cut payday loan providers from its advertising platforms, citing the potentially damaging effects to borrowers of short-term, high-interest cash loans. "Research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that," Google's head of global product policy, David Graf,f said in an announcement posted to the company's blog. The average payday loan borrower spends five months of the year in debt, paying more in fees than originally received, according to research compiled by the Pew Charitable Trusts. "Our hope is that fewer people will be exposed to misleading or harmful products," Graff said. The policy change, which follows a similar move by Facebook, won plaudits from advocacy groups concerned with the impact of payday loans on low-income borrowers.

A government-led effort to develop commercial guidelines for face-recognition technology is moving forward, and it has privacy advocates red in the face. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency within the U.S. Commerce Department, held a meeting in Washington Tuesday to consider a set of "best practices" for collecting and storing facial data and to discuss how face-recognition technology might apply to the Obama administration's so-called Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights publicized in 2012. The meeting is part of an ongoing process being billed as a "multistakeholder" effort to develop an enforceable code of conduct for emerging biometric technologies, but privacy groups say their warnings about potential privacy abuses are not being heard. Instead, they say the process has been hijacked by technology industry interests intent on harnessing sensitive private data for monetary gain. "Lobbyists craft purposefully vague proposals without any real safeguards for biometric data," Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.