The U.S. Federal Trade Commission recently posted a blog outlining its enforcement priorities regarding chatbots.
Here are some takeaways.
- Don’t misrepresent what these services are or can do. Your therapy bots aren’t licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends. Your grief bots have no soul. Your AI copilots are not gods.
- Don’t offer these services without adequately mitigating risks of harmful output.
- Don’t insert ads into a chat interface without clarifying that it’s paid content. Any generative AI output should distinguish clearly between what is organic and what is paid. The FTC has also explored the wider problem of blurred digital advertising to children, advising marketers to steer clear of it altogether.
- Don’t use consumer relationships with avatars and bots for commercial manipulation. Consistent with the FTC’s rulemaking proposal to make it easier for people to “click to cancel” subscriptions, a bot shouldn’t plead not to be turned off.
- Don’t violate consumer privacy rights. It’s imperative that companies are honest and transparent about the collection and use of this information and that they don’t surreptitiously change privacy policies or relevant terms of service.