Facebook and Instagram proprietor Meta says it should type a workforce to deal with misleading synthetic intelligence (AI) content material within the upcoming EU elections in June.
It is worried by how generative AI – tech which may pretend movies, photographs and audio – may be used to trick voters.
It comes the identical day Home Secretary James Cleverly instructed the Times some folks will use AI-generated fakes to attempt to affect a basic election.
The BBC has requested Meta if it has such plans for upcoming UK and US elections.
The announcement comes two weeks after Meta signed an settlement with different massive tech companies committing to combating such content material.
The European Parliament vote shall be held from 6 to 9 June this yr.
Social media rival TikTok introduced in February it will be launching so-called “Election Centres” in native languages inside its app for every of the 27 EU members, which is able to host authoritative info.
Meta head of EU affairs Marco Pancini stated in a weblog put up that the agency, which additionally owns Instagram and WhatsApp, would launch “an EU-specific Elections Operations Centre” which might “identify potential threats and put specific mitigations in place across our apps and technologies in real time”.
“Since 2016, we’ve invested more than $20bn (£15.7bn) into safety and security and quadrupled the size of our global team working in this area to around 40,000 people,” he stated.
“This includes 15,000 content reviewers who review content across Facebook, Instagram and Threads in more than 70 languages – including all 24 official EU languages.”
He stated this meant bringing collectively consultants from a variety of various groups throughout the corporate, together with these working in engineering, knowledge science and legislation.
The agency, which presently works with 26 fact-checking organisations throughout the EU, stated it will convey on board three extra companions based mostly in Bulgaria, France and Slovakia.
The function of those organisations is to not take care of content material which is meant to suppress voting – these sorts of posts are banned – however relatively to debunk content material that’s spreading misinformation, together with after they contain AI-generated parts.
Mr Pancini stated these kind of posts could be given warning labels and made much less outstanding, in addition to not being allowed in adverts.
Ads can not query the legitimacy of the vote, prematurely declare victory, or query “the methods and processes of election”.
But he stated the agency’s work was a results of collaboration, and it will require additional coordination sooner or later.
“Since AI-generated content appears across the internet, we’ve also been working with other companies in our industry on common standards and guidelines,” he stated.
“This work is bigger than any one company and will require a huge effort across industry, government, and civil society.”
