The FTC, fresh off announcing a whole new division taking on “snake oil” in tech, has sent another shot across the bows of the over-eager industry with a sassy warning to “keep your AI claims in check.”
I wrote a little while ago (okay, five years) that “AI Powered” is the meaningless tech equivalent of “all natural,” but it has progressed beyond cheeky. It seems like just about every product out there claims to implement AI in some way or another, yet few go into detail — and fewer still can tell you exactly how it works and why.
The FTC doesn’t like it. Whatever someone means when they say “powered by artificial intelligence” or some version thereof, “One thing is for sure: it’s a marketing term,” the agency writes. “And at the FTC, one thing we know about hot marketing terms is that some advertisers won’t be able to stop themselves from overusing and abusing them.”
Everyone is saying AI is reinventing everything, but it’s one thing to do that at a TED talk; it’s quite another to claim it as an official part of your product. And the FTC wants marketers to know that these claims may count as “false or unsubstantiated,” something the agency is very experienced with regulating.
So if your product uses AI or your marketing team claims it does, the FTC asks you to consider:
“You don’t need a machine to predict what the FTC might do when those claims are unsupported,” it concludes, ominously.
Since the agency already put out some common-sense guidelines for AI claims back in 2021 (there were a lot of “detect and predict COVID” ones then), it directs questions to that document, which includes citations and precedents.
Source @TechCrunch
