Facts
At its 337th meeting on 12 September 2023 the Advertisement Board of the Ministry of Trade considered 137 files, found 119 in breach of the rules, and ordered suspensions as well as administrative fines totalling TRY 12,231,507. According to the Ministry's announcement, advertisements created with AI came before the Board for the first time at that meeting. Three of the files concerned promotions whose content had been generated by the AI application ChatGPT and which contained statements conveying superiority over competing products or firms. The announcement did not name the advertisers.
Question
Does using text produced by a generative AI application in a promotion take that content outside the rules on commercial advertising and unfair commercial practices? In particular, must claims of superiority over competitors rest on objective research even when they were generated by an AI tool? And does the tool used to produce the content affect the advertiser's responsibility? The Ministry's announcement does not set out the Board's reasoning on these points in detail.
Decision
In the three files concerning promotions generated by ChatGPT that conveyed superiority over competing products or firms without being based on objective research, the Board ordered the advertisements to be suspended. The Ministry's announcement stressed that content is examined by the Advertisement Board whenever it qualifies as commercial advertising, regardless of the medium in which it was created or published. The announcement did not say whether fines were also imposed in these three files or which provisions were applied.
Why it matters
The decision shows that promotional content produced with an AI tool is subject to the ordinary advertising rules, and that the requirement for superiority claims to rest on objective research does not depend on how the content was produced. Consumer rules are applied to AI-generated advertising as they stand, without waiting for dedicated regulation.