Meta Plans To Make Disclosure Mandatory For AI Use In Political Ads From 2024, Day After Announcing Prohibition

In a recent development, Meta Platforms has announced that, starting in 2024, advertisers on Facebook and Instagram will be obligated to divulge their use of artificial intelligence (AI) or other digital techniques for modifying or generating political, social, or election-related advertisements as reported by The Hindu.

As the world's second-largest platform for digital advertising, Meta revealed in a blog post that advertisers will need to disclose if their altered or fabricated ads depict real individuals engaged in actions or making statements they did not, or if they create lifelike images of non-existent persons.

Furthermore, Meta will require advertisers to indicate whether their ads depict events that never occurred, manipulate real event footage, or portray actual events without authentic visual, video, or audio records of those events.

These policy updates follow Meta's previous announcement of restricting political advertisers from utilising generative AI advertising tools.

This move comes in response to the expanding access for advertisers to AI-powered tools that facilitate the immediate creation of backgrounds, image adjustments, and ad copy variations based on simple text prompts.

Alphabet's Google, the foremost digital advertising company, recently introduced analogous image-customisation generative AI ad tools, pledging to exclude politics by prohibiting specific "political keywords" as prompts for these tools.

In the United States, lawmakers have expressed apprehension regarding the use of AI in generating content that falsely represents political candidates in advertisements, with the proliferation of affordable and convincing deepfake technology.

Meta has already blocked its user-facing Meta AI virtual assistant from generating lifelike images of public figures.

Nick Clegg, Meta's chief policy executive, emphasised the need to revise rules concerning the application of generative AI in political advertising.

It is important to note that Meta's new policy will not necessitate disclosures when digital content alterations are "inconsequential or immaterial to the claim, assertion, or issue raised in the ad."

This includes minor adjustments such as image resizing, cropping, color correction, and image enhancement.