A spokesman for Meta, the owner of Facebook, said it will prevent political advertisers from using its new advertising products powered by generative artificial intelligence, which will hinder campaigns’ access to tools that lawmakers warn could accelerate the spread of election misinformation.
Meta has not yet revealed the decision in any update to its advertising standards, which prohibit ads with content that its fact-checking partners deem false.
Meta does not appear to have any rules specific to artificial intelligence.
This policy comes a month after Meta, the second largest digital advertising platform in the world, announced that it had begun expanding advertisers’ access to artificial intelligence-powered advertising tools that can create backgrounds, image modifications, and various forms of advertising simply by requesting it in writing.
The company initially made these tools available only to a small group of advertisers as of the spring.
The company said at the time that it was on track to roll it out to all advertisers globally by next year.
Meta and other technology companies have been racing to launch innovative advertising products powered by generative artificial intelligence and virtual assistant programs in the past few months.
This came in the wake of the uproar that accompanied the launch last year of the Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI, a chatbot called ChatGBT, which can provide human-like written responses to questions and other requests.
The companies have released little information so far about the safety restrictions they plan to impose on these systems, making Meta’s decision on political ads one of the most important policy options related to artificial intelligence in the industry that has emerged so far.
Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, the world’s largest digital advertising company, announced last week the launch of similar generative artificial intelligence tools to modify images on demand.
A Google spokesperson told Reuters that the company plans to keep politics out of its products by preventing the use of a list of “political keywords” to issue a command or request from its artificial intelligence search engine. Google also plans to update its policy by mid-November, which requires that Election-related ads must disclose whether they contain “synthetic content that incorrectly portrays real people or events or appears realistic in appearance.”
Snapchat, the owner of the Snapchat application, and the TikTok website prohibit political ads, while the X website (formerly Twitter) did not offer any advertising tools that work with generative artificial intelligence.
Meta’s chief policy officer, Nick Clegg, said last month that the use of generative AI in political advertising “is an area where we clearly need to update our rules.”
Clegg warned governments and technology companies alike to prepare for the possibility of using this technology to interfere in the upcoming US presidential elections in 2024, calling for a special focus on election-related content “that moves from one platform to another.”