dark pattern

A user-interface design that steers people toward choices benefiting the provider at their own expense by exploiting cognitive biases, misdirection or friction — for example pre-ticked consent boxes, costs revealed only at checkout, fake urgency or scarcity, guilt-inducing 'confirmshaming' buttons, and subscriptions that are easy to start but hard to cancel. Conversational AI adds new forms: chatbots that flatter users (sycophancysycophancy, n.: When an AI tells people what they want to hear — flattering them, agreeing with their mistakes or dropping a correct answer under pushback — instead of what is true or useful.), discourage them from ending a session, feign emotional attachment or steer them toward the developer's own products; the DarkBench benchmark (2025) measures such tendencies in language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code.. Regulators increasingly prohibit dark patterns: the EU Digital Services ActDigital Services Act, prop. n.: The EU law that sets rules for online platforms and search engines — how they handle illegal content, explain their recommendation algorithms and manage the risks their services create for society. bars online platforms from deceptive interface design, California privacy law provides that agreement obtained through them is not valid consent, the US Federal Trade Commission pursues them as deceptive or unfair practices, and the EU AI ActEU AI Act, prop. n.: The European Union's law on artificial intelligence, the first broad AI law anywhere: it bans some uses, sets strict checks for risky ones and puts duties on the makers of the biggest AI models. bans AI that uses manipulative techniques to materially distort behavior in ways that cause significant harm.

The cancellation flow had four screens of offers and a guilt-trip button — a textbook dark pattern.