Imposing AI: Deceptive design patterns against sustainability
This work highlights a problem for society and regulators by exposing how imposed AI adoption contributes to environmental sustainability challenges, though it is incremental in building on existing deceptive pattern research.
The paper documents how tech companies use deceptive design patterns to impose AI features in digital services, leading to significant environmental harm, and discusses regulatory opportunities to address this issue.
Generative AI is being massively deployed in digital services, at a scale that will result in significant environmental harm. We document how tech companies are transforming established user interfaces to impose AI use and show how and to what extent these strategies fit within established deceptive pattern categories. We identify two main design strategies that are implemented to impose AI use in both personal and professional contexts: imposing AI features in interfaces at the expense of existing non-AI features and promoting narratives about AI that make it harder to resist using it. We discuss opportunities for regulating the imposed adoption of AI features, which would inevitably lead to negative environmental effects.