Utilizing AI-based models to detect greenwashing behavior in corporations: A case study of Tesla

Abstract

In the current societal landscape, consumers are increasingly concerned about the environment and are wary of greenwashing tactics when making purchasing decisions. This leads to a rise in the advertising of sustainable products. However, many of these claims about being environmentally friendly are exaggerated. So, it is necessary to develop an effective and understandable scoring framework to detect the corporate greenwashing behaviour to help monitor and push the entity reduce their greenwashing behaviour. Yet there are only several articles trying to use AI-based models to assess the corporate greenwashing and most of their database is not assessable and more importantly the criteria of the AI models to assess greenwashing is not clear enough. To move the field forward, this chapter develops a series of criteria based on the AI model formula which was come up with former scholar to help assess the greenwashing. A literature review and case study method based on Tesla have been used to demo the feasibility of proposed scoring framework.