On Wednesday, Meta Platforms announced that starting in 2024, advertisers using artificial intelligence (AI) or other digital methods to modify or create political, social, or election-related ads on Facebook and Instagram will be required to disclose such practices.
As the world’s second-largest digital advertising platform, Meta outlined in a blog post that advertisers must reveal if their altered or created ads depict real individuals doing or saying things they did not, or if they digitally fabricate a realistic-looking person that is non-existent.
The disclosure requirement also extends to ads portraying events that never occurred, manipulating footage of real events, or depicting real events without the accurate image, video, or audio recording of the actual event. This policy update builds upon Meta’s previous decision to prohibit political advertisers from utilizing generative AI ad tools, and it comes a month after the company expanded advertisers’ access to AI-powered tools that rapidly generate backgrounds, adjust images, and create variations of ad copy in response to simple text prompts.
In a similar move, Google, the largest digital advertising company, recently introduced image-customizing generative AI ad tools, pledging to keep politics out of its products by blocking a list of “political keywords” from being used as prompts.
In the United States, lawmakers have expressed concerns about the use of AI to produce content that inaccurately portrays candidates in political ads, leveraging new “generative AI” tools that make it cost-effective and straightforward to create convincing deepfakes.
Meta has been proactive in addressing these concerns, previously preventing its user-facing Meta AI virtual assistant from generating lifelike images of public figures. Nick Clegg, Meta’s top policy executive, emphasized last month the need to update rules regarding the use of generative AI in political advertising.
It’s important to note that Meta’s new policy will not mandate disclosures for digital content alterations deemed “inconsequential or immaterial to the claim, assertion, or issue raised in the ad,” such as adjusting image size, cropping, color correction, or image sharpening.
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