Reveal the Truth: AI-Altered Political Ads Must Now Be Disclosed!

Meta Platforms said on Wednesday that by 2024, advertisers will have to disclose when artificial intelligence (AI) or other digital methods are used to modify or create political, social or election-related ads on Facebook and Instagram.

Meta, the world’s second-largest digital ad platform, said in a blog post that it would require advertisers to disclose whether their altered or created ads depict real people doing or saying something they didn’t do, or digitally reproduce a real-looking person who doesn’t exist.

The company also asks advertisers to disclose whether these ads show events that did not happen, alter footage from an actual event, or even depict an actual event without an actual image, video, or audio recording of the actual event.

The policy updates, including Meta’s earlier announcement of blocking political advertisers from using creative AI ad tools, came a month after the Facebook owner said it would begin expanding advertisers’ access to AI-powered ad tools that can instantly create backgrounds and image adjustments. and ad text variations in response to a simple text prompt.

Alphabet’s largest digital advertising company announced last week that it would launch similar image-adaptive generative AI ad tools and said it plans to keep politics out of its products by banning the use of a list of “political keywords” as prompts.

US lawmakers have been concerned about using artificial intelligence to create content depicting false candidates in political ads to influence federal elections, and a range of new “generative AI tools” are making it cheap and easy to create convincing deep fakes.

Meta has already banned its user-facing Meta AI virtual assistant from creating photo-realistic images of public figures, and its chief policy officer Nick Clegg said last month that the use of generative AI in political advertising was “clearly an area where we need to update our rules.”

The company’s new policy does not require disclosure when the digital content is “irrelevant or irrelevant to the claim, argument or issue presented in the ad,” including image resizing, image cropping, color correction or image sharpening.

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