A group of 20 tech companies announced Friday that they have agreed to work together to prevent deceptive artificial intelligence content from interfering with elections around the world this year.
The rapid growth of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which can create text, images, and videos in seconds in response to prompts, is helping more than half of the world’s population participate in this new technology to sway this year’s major elections. There are growing concerns that it will be used. The population is scheduled to head to the polling stations.
Signatories to the technology agreement, announced at the Munich Security Conference, include companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Adobe that are building generative AI models used to create content.
Other signatories include social media platforms that face challenges in removing harmful content from their sites, such as Meta Platform, TikTok, and X (formerly known as Twitter).
The agreement includes collaborating on developing tools to detect misleading AI-generated images, videos, and audio; creating awareness campaigns to educate voters about deceptive content; includes a commitment to cooperate by taking action against such content.
Technologies to identify AI-generated content or prove its origin may include embedding watermarks and metadata, the companies said.
The agreement does not specify a timeline for meeting the commitments or how each company will implement them.
“I think the usefulness of this (agreement) is the breadth of companies that sign it,” said Nick Clegg, Meta Platforms’ global president.
“It’s all well and good for individual platforms to develop new policies for things like detection, provenance, labeling, and watermarking, but unless there’s a broader commitment to doing it in a shared and interoperable way, we ‘We’re going to do that.’ It’s going to be a hodgepodge of different commitments,” Mr Clegg said.
Generative AI is already being used to influence politics and persuade people not to vote.
In January, a robocall featuring a fake voice of President Biden was sent to voters in New Hampshire, urging them to stay home during the state’s presidential primary.
Despite the popularity of text generation tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, tech companies will focus on preventing the negative effects of AI’s photo, video, and audio, in part because people don’t respond well to text. That’s because they tend to be more skeptical, said Dana Rao, Adobe’s chief trust officer. interview.
“There is an emotional connection to audio, video and images,” he said. “Your brain is wired to believe that kind of media.”
