Generative AI and the future of marketing: A consumer protection perspective

Generative AI has the potential to be the biggest disruption in marketing since the emergence of digital commerce in the early 2000s. This article will focus on three ways in which generative AI is expected to change marketing. First, generative AI enables companies to automatically create advertising copy and images, potentially leading to significant cost reductions. Secondly, generative AI offers possibilities to improve and automate personalised marketing, potentially enabling companies to send the right persuasive message at the right time to each potential customer. Thirdly, generative AI potentially offers possibilities to market products to consumers via generative AI chatbots. These developments offer potential advantages but also bear risks for consumers. For example, deepfakes in advertising can mislead consumers, AI-generated personalised marketing can exploit consumer vulnerabilities, and B2C chatbots can deceive consumers by providing biased advice. This article shows that EU law does in principle provide protection to consumers in relation to AI-generated marketing, but is also likely to fall short in effectively protecting consumers against the identified risks in several ways.