Meta's advertising standards prohibit ads with content that have been debunked by the company’s fact-checking partners but do not have any rules specifically on AI. — AFP
NEW YORK: Facebook owner Meta is barring political campaigns and advertisers in other regulated industries from using its new generative artificial intelligence (AI) advertising products, a company spokesperson says, denying access to tools that lawmakers have warned could turbo-charge the spread of election misinformation.
Meta publicly disclosed the decision in updates posted to its help centre on Monday night, following publication of this story. Its advertising standards prohibit ads with content that have been debunked by the company’s fact-checking partners but do not have any rules specifically on AI.
“As we continue to test new Generative AI ads creation tools in Ads Manager, advertisers running campaigns that qualify as ads for housing, employment or credit or social issues, elections, or politics, or related to health, pharmaceuticals or financial services aren’t currently permitted to use these Generative AI features,” the company said in a note appended to several pages explaining how the tools work.“We believe this approach will allow us to better understand potential risks and build the right safeguards for the use of Generative AI in ads that relate to potentially sensitive topics in regulated industries,” it said.
The policy update comes a month after Meta – the world’s second-biggest platform for digital ads – announced it was starting to expand advertisers’ access to AI-powered advertising tools that can instantly create backgrounds, image adjustments and variations of ad copy in response to simple text prompts.
The tools were initially made available only to a small group of advertisers starting in the spring.
They are on track to roll out to all advertisers globally by next year, the company said at the time.
Meta and other tech companies have raced to launch generative AI ad products and virtual assistants in recent months in response to the frenzy over the debut last year of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, which can provide human-like written responses to questions and other prompts.
The companies have released little information so far about the safety guard rails they plan to impose on those systems, making Meta’s decision on political ads one of the industry’s most significant AI policy choices to come to light to date.
Alphabet’s Google, the biggest digital advertising company, announced the launch of similar image-customising generative AI ads tools last week. It plans to keep politics out of its products by blocking a list of “political keywords” from being used as prompts, a Google spokesperson told Reuters.
Google has also planned a mid-November policy update to require that election-related ads must include a disclosure if they contain “synthetic content that inauthentically depicts real or realistic-looking people or events”.
TikTok and Snapchat owner Snap both bar political ads, while X, previously known as Twitter, has not rolled out any generative AI advertising tools.
Meta’s top policy executive, Nick Clegg, said last month that the use of generative AI in political advertising “is clearly an area where we need to update our rules”. — Reuters
