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The FTC, fresh off announcing a whole new division taking on \u201csnake oil\u201d in tech<\/a>, has sent another shot across the bows of the over-eager industry with a sassy warning to \u201ckeep your AI claims in check.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n I wrote a little while ago (okay, five years<\/a>) that \u201cAI Powered\u201d is the meaningless tech equivalent of \u201call natural,\u201d 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 \u2014 and fewer still can tell you exactly it works and why.<\/p>\n The FTC doesn\u2019t like it. Whatever someone means when they say \u201cpowered by artificial intelligence\u201d or some version thereof, \u201cOne thing is for sure: it\u2019s a marketing term,\u201d the agency writes. \u201cAnd at the FTC, one thing we know about hot marketing terms is that some advertisers won\u2019t be able to stop themselves from overusing and abusing them.\u201d<\/p>\n Everyone is saying AI is reinventing everything, but it\u2019s one thing to do that at a TED talk; it\u2019s 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 \u201cfalse or unsubstantiated,\u201d something the agency is very experienced with regulating.<\/p>\n So if your product uses AI or your marketing team claims it does, the FTC asks you to consider:<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t need a machine to predict what the FTC might do when those claims are unsupported,\u201d it concludes, ominously.<\/p>\n Since the agency already put out some common-sense guidelines for AI claims back in 2021 (there were a lot of \u201cdetect and predict COVID\u201d ones then), it directs questions to that document<\/a>, which includes citations and precedents.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n