Meta’s AI Tools: No Political Ads Allowed!

(This Nov. 6 story has been updated to correct a reference to Snapchat’s policy on political ads in point 11)

NEW YORK: Facebook owner Meta is blocking political campaigns and advertisers in other regulated industries from using its new generative artificial intelligence advertising products, a company spokesman said Monday, denying access to tools that lawmakers have warned could turbocharge the spread of election misinformation.

Meta announced the decision publicly in updates posted to its help center Monday night after this story was published. Its advertising standards prohibit ads whose content has been rejected by the company’s fact-checking partners, but which do not have specific AI rules.

“As we continue to test the new generative AI ad creation tools in Ads Manager, advertisers running campaigns that qualify as ads for housing, employment or credit or social affairs, elections or politics, or related to health, medicine or financial services are not currently allowed to use these generative AI capabilities,” the company said in a multipage note explaining how the tools work.

“We believe this approach will help us better understand the potential risks and build the right safeguards for the use of Generative AI in advertising related to potentially sensitive topics in regulated industries,” it said.

The policy update comes a month after Meta — the world’s second-largest digital ad platform — announced it would begin expanding advertisers’ access to AI-powered advertising tools that can instantly create backgrounds, image adjustments and variations of ad text in response to simple text prompts.

Starting in the spring, the tools were only available to a small advertiser. They are coming to all advertisers worldwide 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.

So far, the companies have released little information about the safeguards they plan to put in place for these systems, making Meta’s decision to stop political ads one of the industry’s most significant AI policy choices to date.

Google, Alphabet’s largest digital advertising company, announced last week that it would launch similar image-adaptive generative AI advertising tools. It plans to keep politics out of its products by preventing a list of “political keywords” from being used as prompts, a Google spokesperson told Reuters.

Google has also planned a policy update for mid-November that will require election-related ads to include a disclaimer if they contain “synthetic content that inaccurately depicts real or realistic-looking people or events.”

TikTok blocks political ads, while Snapchat owner Snap blocks them on its AI chatbot. Snapchat also uses human review to fact-check all political ads, which includes ensuring no misleading use of artificial intelligence. X, formerly known as Twitter, has not adopted generative AI advertising tools.

Nick Clegg, Meta’s chief policy officer, said last month that the use of generative AI in political advertising was “clearly an area where we need to update our rules”.

He warned ahead of a recent AI security summit in the UK that governments and tech companies should prepare for the technology to be used to interfere in the upcoming 2024 election, calling for a particular focus on election-related content “that moves from one platform to another.”

Earlier, Clegg told Reuters that Meta prevented its user-facing Meta AI virtual assistant from creating photo-realistic images of public figures. This summer, Meta committed to developing a system for “watermarking” content created by artificial intelligence.

Meta strictly prohibits misleading AI-generated videos in all content, including organic free posts, excluding parody or satire.

The company’s independent oversight board said last month it was investigating the wisdom of that approach and took up a case involving a replayed video of US President Joe Biden, which Meta said it had dropped because it wasn’t created by artificial intelligence.

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