There is no place to make informal threats in blog posts. It's not welcome at all.
Nobody said anything about enforcement activities. The FTC have all kinds of mechanisms to make it known what the rules are. Like, the rules themselves, notices, policy statements, what amounts to position papers, etc. This isn't kindergarten and the citizens of the united states aren't children. Blog posts with friendly tone and threats of punishment for ill-behavior simply isn't appropriate.
You can't put it in these terms and not have a moment to reflect on what's happening in our technology sphere. In particular in regard to CEOs of companies directly involved in these dubious AI claims where customer's life is on the line
I am deeply symapthic of the FTC's position in respect to trying to pass a message where common sense and formal communication have no effect.
It's important to put it in those terms even when there are bad actors, because there always will be. The US government isn't supposed to be our keeper, it's supposed to be of the people, by the people, for the people.
Aside from the problematic medium, claiming something uses AI or is AI or has AI isn't a specific claim with respect to what the product can or cannot do. A product can do X or not. Whether someone punched out 7 million lines of if/else statements or 7 lines of pytorch to approximate the 7 million lines of explicit code matters not. As such, a product making any claim of AI isn't actually a large problem, even if it is total bs. The fact that the current folks at the FTC don't appear to understand this suggests they are trying to regulate something they don't understand.
I'm not sure to understand your point on what the product can actually do: this whole blog entry is about sticking the marketing claims to reality, what exactly the product does, and not make vague promises because it uses AI.
Basically, outside of their tone, you seem to me 100% in agreement with the FTC's message here.
You are right in that the tone/medium of the message is the problematic issue.
But, even outside that, claiming something is/has/uses AI is practically meaningless. It's not a concrete claim, so consumers of said product aren't damaged by such claim. A claim of risk free returns of 50% causes harm. A false claim of curing cancer causes harm. So no, I'm not in agreement with it. The FTC should find more important things to spend the time of their 1100 people on, especially when they don't even seem to understand the topic at hand.
Nobody said anything about enforcement activities. The FTC have all kinds of mechanisms to make it known what the rules are. Like, the rules themselves, notices, policy statements, what amounts to position papers, etc. This isn't kindergarten and the citizens of the united states aren't children. Blog posts with friendly tone and threats of punishment for ill-behavior simply isn't appropriate.