No Political Ads Allowed: Meta Platforms Ban AI Ad Tools
The upcoming US Presidential elections are scheduled for November 5 next year, leaving less than a year for the significant electoral process. Similarly, India’s general elections are set to occur in April-May 2024, which is approximately six months away. Consequently, this period will witness a surge in political promotions and campaigns as individual political leaders and parties strive to enhance their public visibility. While AI could be a useful tool for them, it may not be ideal for voters who will likely be bombarded with propaganda advertisements. Recognizing this concern, Meta has announced that its AI ads creation tool will not be accessible to political advertisers.
The information first came from a report by Reuters, which mentioned that the parent company of Facebook and Instagram is blocking political campaigns and advertisers in other regulated industries from using its new generative AI advertising products. The decision was made in order not to promote the spread of false information about the elections.
Later, Meta also updated its help center, saying: “As we continue to test the new generative AI ad creation tools in Ads Manager, advertisers who run campaigns that qualify as ads for housing, work or credit or social issues, elections or politics, or related to health, medicine or financial services, are currently not allowed to use these generative AI capabilities.”
“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 added.
Meta prevents political advertisers from using artificial intelligence ad tools
A month after Meta, the world’s second-largest digital ad platform, announced plans to expand advertisers’ access to AI-powered advertising tools that can quickly create backgrounds, edit images and create different ad copy based on simple text prompts, the company has updated its policy. Initially, these tools were available to limited advertisers in the spring, but Meta aims to make them available to all advertisers worldwide by next year.
In recent months, Meta and other tech companies have been racing to introduce generative AI advertising products and virtual assistants, responding to the excitement generated by the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot last year. This chatbot is capable of delivering human-like written responses to questions and prompts.
In particular, these companies have provided limited information about the security measures they plan to implement for these systems, making Meta’s decision to engage in political advertising a central and significant choice in the field of AI politics.
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