FTC Submits Comment to FCC on Work to Protect Consumers from Potential Harmful Effects of AI

The Federal Trade Commission highlighted the agency’s work to protect consumers from potential harms related to artificial intelligence in a comment submitted as part of the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) notice of inquiry examining the implications of emerging AI technologies.

The FCC launched a notice of inquiry in November 2023 to examine efforts to address the impact of AI as it works to protect consumers from unwanted and illegal telephone calls and text messages under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

In its comment, the FTC outlined the agency’s efforts to use all the tools at its disposal to address the rapid emergence of new technologies powered by AI and their potential risks to consumers and businesses. As part of the agency’s law enforcement work, the FTC has taken action against companies that deceive users about their use of AI or use AI in unfair ways. For example, the FTC alleged that Amazon and Ring used highly private data—voice recordings collected by Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant and videos collected by Ring’s internet-connected home security cameras—to train their algorithms while violating customers’ privacy. The comment also discussed the agency’s rule outlawing government and business impersonation scams—a type of fraud that generative AI can turbocharge.

In its comment, FTC staff also discussed the agency’s efforts to combat AI-enabled voice cloning. Scammers are using voice cloning technology to impersonate family or friends, business executives or others to obtain money from consumers. To help address this growing problem, the FTC last year launched its Voice Cloning Challenge to promote the development of ideas to protect consumers from the misuse of AI-enabled voice cloning for fraud and other harms.

In April, the agency announced four winning submissions. They included: AI Detect, which uses AI algorithms to differentiate between genuine and synthetic voice patterns; DeFake, which proposes a protective mechanism to add carefully crafted perturbations to voice samples to hinder the cloning process; OriginStory, which proposes using off-the-shelf sensors to help authenticate the human origin of voice recordings at the point of creation; and Voice Cloning Detection, which calls for using liveness detection technology to detect voice clones and audio deepfakes in real time.

The Commission voted 5-0 to authorize FTC staff to file the comment.