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The Federal Trade Commission recently announced that it will pursue outsized and unfounded claims about artificial intelligence in advertising. This puts contractors on notice as well. If you tout your use of AI, you could be soon coming under the formidable gaze of the FTC.
Here’s the deal. Attorney Michael Atleson of the FTC Division of Advertising Practices wrote an eye-opening article entitled “Keep Your AI Claims In Check”. The gist of the piece was there is abundant temptation to hype and deceptively market AI usage.
“And what exactly is ‘artificial intelligence’ anyway? It’s an ambiguous term with many possible definitions. It often refers to a variety of technological tools and techniques that use computation to perform tasks such as predictions, decisions, or recommendations. But one thing is for sure: it’s a marketing term. Right now, it’s a hot one. 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.”
As noted in the FTC blog posting, one difficulty with the emergence of AI is that its definition is confounding, leaving open a wide variety of legal interpretations. This can be confusing for contractors.
Just because there are bona fide definitional issues underlying AI doesn’t give you unfettered...
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