Emotional Ai And Its Challenges In The Viewpoint Of Online Marketing

The technological development of the affective and intelligent artificial agents capable to communicate with emotional expressions is a blessing and a curse. Affective systems, i.e. the emotionally designed and programmed artificial agents and new types of nudging technics empowered by artificial intelligence (AI) have taken focus in the international literature. The main human expectation of a human-like robot is to show empathy; therefore, the development of the emotional AI is essential for the new technology in order to gain trust. However, the affective AI can be applied in an abusive way or for an illegal purpose, which is also prohibited by ethical guidelines worldwide. The artificial emotions could create a false impression of human connection or interaction or could generate false sense of bonding. The emotional AI may affect vulnerable and susceptible persons, so that it may have unethical and harmful influence upon their minds and the freedom of their decision-making process and choices. Counterbalancing these threats, new generation of human rights is emerging. In the following, only one relevant field of protective law measures against harmful affective AI will be touched upon: misleading or manipulative advertising as unfair commercial practices within the broad context of the consumer protection law.