ReportWire

Tag: dark patterns

  • Chatbots Play With Your Emotions to Avoid Saying Goodbye

    [ad_1]

    Regulation of dark patterns has been proposed and is being discussed in both the US and Europe. De Freitas says regulators also should look at whether AI tools introduce more subtle—and potentially more powerful—new kinds of dark patterns.

    Even regular chatbots, which tend to avoid presenting themselves as companions, can elicit emotional responses from users though. When OpenAI introduced GPT-5, a new flagship model, earlier this year, many users protested that it was far less friendly and encouraging than its predecessor—forcing the company to revive the old model. Some users can become so attached to a chatbot’s “personality” that they may mourn the retirement of old models.

    “When you anthropomorphize these tools, it has all sorts of positive marketing consequences,” De Freitas says. Users are more likely to comply with requests from a chatbot they feel connected with, or to disclose personal information, he says. “From a consumer standpoint, those [signals] aren’t necessarily in your favor,” he says.

    WIRED reached out to each of the companies looked at in the study for comment. Chai, Talkie, and PolyBuzz did not respond to WIRED’s questions.

    Katherine Kelly, a spokesperson for Character AI, said that the company had not reviewed the study so could not comment on it. She added: “We welcome working with regulators and lawmakers as they develop regulations and legislation for this emerging space.”

    Minju Song, a spokesperson for Replika, says the company’s companion is designed to let users log off easily and will even encourage them to take breaks. “We’ll continue to review the paper’s methods and examples, and [will] engage constructively with researchers,” Song says.

    An interesting flip side here is the fact that AI models are themselves also susceptible to all sorts of persuasion tricks. On Monday OpenAI introduced a new way to buy things online through ChatGPT. If agents do become widespread as a way to automate tasks like booking flights and completing refunds, then it may be possible for companies to identify dark patterns that can twist the decisions made by the AI models behind those agents.

    A recent study by researchers at Columbia University and a company called MyCustomAI reveals that AI agents deployed on a mock ecommerce marketplace behave in predictable ways, for example favoring certain products over others or preferring certain buttons when clicking around the site. Armed with these findings, a real merchant could optimize a site’s pages to ensure that agents buy a more expensive product. Perhaps they could even deploy a new kind of anti-AI dark pattern that frustrates an agent’s efforts to start a return or figure out how to unsubscribe from a mailing list.

    Difficult goodbyes might then be the least of our worries.

    Do you feel like you’ve been emotionally manipulated by a chatbot? Send an email to ailab@wired.com to tell me about it.

    This is an edition of Will Knight’s AI Lab newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

    [ad_2]

    Will Knight

    Source link

  • Amazon Might Owe You $51. Here’s How to Find Out if You’re Eligible

    [ad_1]

    Amazon customers with a Prime subscription will soon be able to make claims online for their share of the $1.5 billion the company is being ordered to pay to users in the United States.

    It’s all part of a recent settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission. Amazon now has to “provide $1.5 billion in refunds back to consumers harmed by their deceptive Prime enrollment practices,” according to a press release from the FTC. The total settlement with the FTC is $2.5 billion, which includes a $1 billion penalty owed to the government.

    “There was no admission of guilt in this settlement by the company or any executives,” says Alisa Carroll, an Amazon spokesperson, in an email sent to WIRED on Thursday after the decision was released. “The settlement largely requires us to maintain the sign-up and cancellation process that has been in place for several years—not to make additional changes.” She says Amazon will comply with the settlement’s decision.

    Who Gets the Amazon Cash?

    Those who are eligible to make a claim may eventually receive up to $51 in total. If you’re one of the millions of Amazon Prime members in the US, odds are you’re curious about whether you can get some of these Bezos bucks. Eligibility hinges on two broad factors, according to the court order filed on Thursday.

    First, the decision includes any US customers who signed up for Prime “through a Challenged Enrollment Flow” in the last six years—from June 23, 2019 to June 23, 2025, to be exact. What counts as a “challenged” sign-up process? The order says it’s “any version of the Universal Prime Decision Page, the Shipping Option Select Page, Prime Video enrollment flow, or the Single Page Checkout.”

    That’s quite extensive! Unless you went directly to the Prime subscription site to enroll, you very well may have encountered multiple nudges from Amazon during the process that fall under this “challenged” sign-up umbrella.

    The second group eligible to make a claim are Amazon Prime customers who started the process of canceling their subscription, but didn’t complete the cancellation. The ruling covers the same six-year time period. It includes users who became frustrated with the cancellation process and quit halfway through, as well as those who took a “Save Offer” that incentivized them to keep the membership for longer.

    Customers who fall into either of these two groups, having enrollment or cancellation issues, are eligible to make a claim. It’s not required for you to fit into both categories to get money from the settlement.

    What’s Next?

    Not everyone who’s eligible will need to submit a claim to get the cash. “Some consumers will receive automatic payments in the next 90 days,” says FTC spokesperson Christopher Bissex in an email sent to WIRED. “The rest of eligible consumers will receive a notification from Amazon, and will have the opportunity to submit a simple claim form.”

    Subscribers who used three or fewer of the benefits provided through Prime in a single year may receive the automatic payment, whereas more avid Prime users will need to make a claim. The specifics about what exactly counts as a single “benefit” remain vague.

    WIRED will update this article as more information becomes available and detail how impacted customers will be able to make their claim with Amazon. In previous instances, like the FTC’s Equifax settlement, many of those eligible made claims through a dedicated website.

    [ad_2]

    Reece Rogers

    Source link

  • Amazon Will Pay $2.5 Billion to Settle FTC Suit That Alleged ‘Dark Patterns’ in Prime Sign-Ups

    [ad_1]

    In the six-year time frame established in the settlement, anyone who “unsuccessfully attempted” to cancel their Prime subscription online is eligible to get paid up to $51 from Amazon. People who signed up for Prime during that same period can also get up to $51 if they signed up through a “challenged enrollment flow”—a page with a confusing interface that may lead to people inadvertently making a purchase. Previous court filings established that in some cases, some users may have selected “two-day shipping” on an item and not realized that, in doing so, they were also signing up for Amazon Prime.

    An FTC spokesperson tells WIRED that automatic payments will go out to some customers within 90 days.

    “The rest of eligible consumers will receive a notification from Amazon, and will have the opportunity to submit a simple claim form,” the FTC says. “Amazon is required to post information about this to Amazon.com and the app. The settlement also requires Amazon to have an independent third party who will monitor their compliance with these claims.”

    The court filing says that Amazon is also “permanently” barred from structuring Prime sign-ups with a confusing “negative option feature” where a customer is assumed to be making a purchase unless they actively refuse it.

    For example, the filing says, a button that reads “No thanks, I don’t want free shipping” does not clearly indicate that a customer will be signed up for Prime unless they click it. Amazon also has to make it obvious when a person is choosing to sign up for Prime, and include language like “Join Prime” in its user interface. Similarly, Amazon has to clearly communicate when a Prime subscription is subject to auto-renewals by using words like “renew.”

    The initial complaint, which was filed by the FTC in June 2023, alleged that while Amazon had improved its process for canceling Prime memberships, the company had spent years knowingly complicating the cancellation process.

    An attachment on a May 7 court filing includes an email chain with Amazon employees from December 2020, which was described as “privileged and confidential” in the subject line. In the email, a manager of Prime content and marketing paraphrased key points that came up in a recent “US prime performance meeting.”

    “Subscription is driving a bit of a shady world,” reads one paraphrased quote, attributed to an unnamed person at the meeting.

    “We should lean away from experimenting with sign-up clarity, and focus more on driving overall members and increasing confirmation that you are prime,” reads a different paraphrased quote from another person at the meeting, included in the same attachment.

    A different attachment shows that Amazon was aware that customers were frustrated. A company slide presentation dated September 17, 2017, focused specifically on customer service complaints about “unintentional” Prime sign-ups. (A different attachment, which includes an email chain dated September 25, 2017, appears to refer to the presentation. Two dozen people were asked to “delete the PowerPoint document” and send “confirmation” once they had.)

    One customer complaint in the presentation claims that they were “tricked” into signing up for a free trial for Amazon Prime when they selected two-day shipping on a purchase, not knowing that this would also sign them up for a trial for Prime.

    “I DO NOT LIKE YOUR SERVICE,” reads another complaint. “THIS IS CRAP THAT I ORDERED A PRODUCT IN AMAZON ADS [sic] ME TO A PROGRAM WITH AUTO BILLING THAT I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR. I WILL NOT USE AMAZON AND TELL EVERYONE ABOUT THIS TYPE OF CRAP YOU ARE PULLING.”

    “IT IS SNEAKY AND BLOODY DISHONEST FORCING SOMETHING THE [sic] I NEVER WANTED,” reads another complaint.

    The same Amazon slide presentation noted that confusing Prime sign-ups were leading to an increased burden on Amazon’s customer service workers, as well as a “loss of customer trust.”

    [ad_2]

    Caroline Haskins

    Source link