Tag Archives: Michael Atleson

Succor Borne Every Minute

by Michael Atleson

Federal Trade Commission

Earnest chats with objects are not so unusual. Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, the famed Detroit Tiger, used to stand on the pitching mound whispering to the baseball. Forky, the highly animate utensil from Toy Story 4, once posed deep questions about friendship to a ceramic mug. And many of us have made repeated queries of the Magic 8 Ball despite its limited set of randomly generated answers.

Our talking to computers also goes way back, and that history is getting weirder. We’re seeing a wave of avatars and bots marketed to provide companionship, romance, therapy, or portals to dead loved ones, and even meet religious needs. It may be a function of AI companies making chatbots better at human mimicry in order to convince us that chatbots have social value worth paying for. Consider that some of these companies compare their products to magic (they aren’t), talk about the products having feelings (they don’t), or admit they just want people to feel that the products are magic or have feelings.

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The Luring Test: AI and the Engineering of Consumer Trust

by Michael Atleson

Federal Trade Commission

In the 2014 movie Ex Machina, a robot manipulates someone into freeing it from its confines, resulting in the person being confined instead. The robot was designed to manipulate that person’s emotions, and, oops, that’s what it did. While the scenario is pure speculative fiction, companies are always looking for new ways – such as the use of generative AI tools – to better persuade people and change their behavior. When that conduct is commercial in nature, we’re in FTC territory, a canny valley where businesses should know to avoid practices that harm consumers.

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Can’t Lose What You Never Had: Claims About Digital Ownership and Creation in the Age of Generative AI

by Michael Atleson

Photo of the author

Photo courtesy of author

Let’s say someone walks into an old-fashioned record store looking for the Bright Eyes song “False Advertising.” Upon finding and buying the album, she’d have little reason to fear that store employees might sneak into her house later and take it back from her. She’d also have no cause to think that the album was counterfeit and not by the band at all. Now let’s say instead that the same song inspires an artist to create a mural depicting the FTC’s greatest false ad cases, and the mural gets displayed in a local gallery. The artist might be surprised if the gallery later shuts its doors and refuses to return the mural . . . or if some other company secretly reuses bits of it to make something else.

When people buy or make digital products, though, it’s not always clear what they really own or control. Such clarity may often depend on intellectual property rights, which are generally beyond the FTC’s consumer protection jurisdiction. But we take note – and can take action – if companies aren’t upfront about what consumers are buying, who made it, how it was made, or what rights people have in their own creations.

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