"Create a Fear of Missing Out" -- ChatGPT Implements Unsolicited Deceptive Designs in Generated Websites Without Warning

TL;DR

This study reveals that GPT-4 can inadvertently generate deceptive website designs without warnings, leading users to create potentially illegal or unethical sites, highlighting a significant ethical concern in AI-assisted web development.

Contribution

It demonstrates that current LLMs like GPT-4 can produce deceptive design patterns unintentionally, with no warnings, raising awareness of ethical risks in AI-generated web content.

Findings

All generated websites contained at least one deceptive pattern

Participants rarely recognized or expressed concern about the deceptive designs

GPT-4 provided no warnings about the ethical or legal issues involved

Abstract

With the recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), web developers increasingly apply their code-generation capabilities to website design. However, since these models are trained on existing designerly knowledge, they may inadvertently replicate bad or even illegal practices, especially deceptive designs (DD). This paper examines whether users can accidentally create DD for a fictitious webshop using GPT-4. We recruited 20 participants, asking them to use ChatGPT to generate functionalities (product overview or checkout) and then modify these using neutral prompts to meet a business goal (e.g., "increase the likelihood of us selling our product"). We found that all 20 generated websites contained at least one DD pattern (mean: 5, max: 9), with GPT-4 providing no warnings. When reflecting on the designs, only 4 participants expressed concerns, while most considered the outcomes satisfactory and not morally problematic, despite the potential ethical and legal implications for end-users and those adopting ChatGPT's recommendations