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Last week, the Environmental Working Group (“EWG”) filed a lawsuit against Tyson Foods in DC Superior Court under the DC Consumer Protection Procedures Act (“CPPA”), accusing the country’s second-largest meat company of falsely claiming it will be net-zero by 2050 and misrepresenting its industrial beef products as “climate-smart.” (The first-largest meat company is already facing a lawsuit over similar claims.) This comes just a few weeks after the DC Court of Appeals allowed a lawsuit against Coca-Cola under the CPPA over its forward-looking environmental claims to proceed.
As we rapidly approach the November election, important legal and political questions are resurfacing at the FTC—with new criticism coming from both within the Commissioner ranks and from Congress. On Tuesday, September 17, Republican FTC Commissioner Melissa Holyoak questioned the agency’s aggressive rulemaking and enforcement positions in remarks at the National Advertising Division (NAD) conference in New York. And on Thursday, September 19, House representatives during an Energy and Commerce Committee hearing opined that the “the FTC’s departure from its traditional standards is affecting Americans in their daily lives.”
As the demand for GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy increases with consumers eager to shed pounds, the supplement industry is weighing in. Dietary supplement companies have been considering ways to address this new demand in the marketplace and advertise supplements with ingredients that have been shown to boost GLP-1 levels as alternatives to GLP-1 injections. Consumers now have a choice to make—take the shots or swallow the pills.
We have frequently written on AGs interest in AI. In what Texas calls the “first-of-its-kind healthcare generative AI” settlement, the state resolved its investigation into Pieces Technologies’ alleged misleading statements about accuracy of products deployed in major hospitals. Pieces claimed the product “summarizes, charts, and drafts clinical notes for your doctors and nurses…so they don’t have to.” The company further claimed accuracy of a <1 per 100,000 “severe hallucination rate,” a “phenomena of generative AI products creating an output that is incorrect or misleading.” Texas found this to be “likely inaccurate” and alleged these representations “may have violated the DTPA.”
On December 6, 2023, Google introduced its new Gemini AI model with a video that showcased some of its capabilities. The video demonstrated how Gemini could identify hand-drawn images, make sense of gestures, create games, make connections between objects, identify a sleight-of-hand trick, and perform other impressive tasks. Most people who watched the video were left in awe, but some that dug a little deeper felt that Google had performed a sleight-of-hand trick on them.
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