The tech giant's head of EU affairs says the team will bring together experts from across the company.
Facebook owner Meta has revealed plans to launch a team dedicated to combating misinformation and harm generated by artificial intelligence (AI) ahead of the upcoming European Parliament elections.
Marco Pancini, head of EU affairs at Meta, said the “EU-specific Election Operations Centre” would bring together experts from across the company to focus on tackling disinformation, influence operations and risks related to abuse. of AI.
“Ahead of the election period, we will make it easier for all our fact-checking partners across the EU to find and rate election-related content because we recognize that speed is especially important during breaking news,” Pancini said in a blog post. post on Sunday.
“We will use keyword detection to group related content in one place, making it easier for fact-checkers to search.”
Pancini said Meta's efforts to address the risks posed by AI would include adding a feature for people to disclose when they share AI-generated video or audio and potential penalties for non-compliance.
“We already tag photorealistic images created with Meta AI, and we're building tools to tag AI-generated images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney, and Shutterstock that users post to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads,” he said.
The launch of artificial intelligence platforms such as OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini have raised concerns about the possibility of fake information, images and videos influencing voters in elections.
The EU Parliament elections, which will take place between June 6 and 9, are among a series of major elections taking place in 2024, which has been called the most important election year in history.
Voters in more than 80 countries, including the United States, India, Mexico and South Africa, will go to the polls in elections representing about half of the world's population.
Earlier this month, Meta joined 19 other tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, X, Amazon and TikTok, to sign a pledge to clamp down on AI content designed to mislead voters.
Under the “Technology Agreement to Combat the Misleading Use of AI in the 2024 Elections,” the companies agreed to take eight measures to address electoral risks, including the development of tools to identify AI-generated content and improve transparency over efforts to address potentially harmful material.
AI's influence on voters has already come under scrutiny in several elections.
Pakistan's jailed former prime minister Imran Khan used artificial intelligence-generated speeches to rally his supporters in the run-up to the country's parliamentary elections earlier this month.
In January, a fake robocall claiming to be from US President Joe Biden urged voters not to cast their ballots in the New Hampshire primary.
