Source : Perth Now news
How artificial intelligence is being used to make products more expensive for you than for the person next to you is under the gaze of the consumer watchdog.
Bots might also be conspiring to lure shoppers away from the best bargains, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) told a parliamentary inquiry into the potentials and perils of AI on Friday.
But there is no easy avenue for the watchdog to go after companies that prey on vulnerable customers with bespoke pricing and surveillance, it said.
“There are positives and negatives to personalised pricing, but the real harm that can come about is where that pricing gets extremely granular,” ACCC digital markets general manager David Abkiewicz said during hearings in Canberra.
“That could potentially establish their willingness to pay completely, or potentially on the basis of personalised data that might indicate vulnerable consumers.”
Giving different prices to certain groups was not against Australian consumer law, Mr Abkiewicz said, although he added restrictions on surveillance pricing were emerging in other jurisdictions including the US.
The watchdog also warned the committee about the risks of “agentic shopping” arising from more consumers deploying bots to shop on their behalf.
The trend has raised the hackles of consumer protectors who fear the agents have in-build brand preferences and are colluding to steer shoppers away from the genuine best deals.
“It’s a continued focus of considering what that looks like and making sure those agents are working in the interest of consumers themselves,” Mr Abkiewicz said.
The watchdog was fighting fires all over the retail landscape, not least in AI making online swindlers more convincing and reducing their barriers to entry.
“Artificial intelligence is enabling scammers to operate at scale, to automate, and to personalise scam contact,” said Jayde Richmond, general manager of the ACCC’s National Anti-Scam Centre.
“We’re not seeing it reported in significant numbers, but we are seeing things like AI voice cloning, the AI deepfake videos, AI being used and potentially to manipulate search results.”
Mr Abkiewicz warned that without intervention, the digital economy in which AI was playing a larger role tended towards strong dominant players who would be tricky to dethrone once established.
“We are still extremely early days, but it is something that we’re aware needs very close and regular scrutiny to make sure that competition remains strong,” he said.
So far, the ACCC’s most high-profile fight on the AI battlefield has been taking Microsoft to court for allegedly misleading 2.7 million Australians about pricing when it baked Copilot, its AI assistant, into its flagship consumer product.
