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    Facebook and Instagram to label digitally altered content ‘made with AI’

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    Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, announced major changes to its policies on digitally created and altered media on Friday, before elections poised to test its ability to police deceptive content generated by artificial intelligence technologies.The social media giant will start applying “Made with AI” labels in May to AI-generated videos, images and audio posted on Facebook and Instagram, expanding a policy that previously addressed only a narrow slice of doctored videos, the vice-president of content policy, Monika Bickert, said in a blogpost.Bickert said Meta would also apply separate and more prominent labels to digitally altered media that poses a “particularly high risk of materially deceiving the public on a matter of importance”, regardless of whether the content was created using AI or other tools. Meta will begin applying the more prominent “high-risk” labels immediately, a spokesperson said.The approach will shift the company’s treatment of manipulated content, moving from a focus on removing a limited set of posts toward keeping the content up while providing viewers with information about how it was made.Meta previously announced a scheme to detect images made using other companies’ generative AI tools by using invisible markers built into the files, but did not give a start date at the time.A company spokesperson said the labeling approach would apply to content posted on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Its other services, including WhatsApp and Quest virtual-reality headsets, are covered by different rules.The changes come months before a US presidential election in November that tech researchers warn may be transformed by generative AI technologies. Political campaigns have already begun deploying AI tools in places like Indonesia, pushing the boundaries of guidelines issued by providers like Meta and generative AI market leader OpenAI.In February, Meta’s oversight board called the company’s existing rules on manipulated media “incoherent” after reviewing a video of Joe Biden posted on Facebook last year that altered real footage to wrongfully suggest the US president had behaved inappropriately.The footage was permitted to stay up, as Meta’s existing “manipulated media” policy bars misleadingly altered videos only if they were produced by artificial intelligence or if they make people appear to say words they never actually said.The board said the policy should also apply to non-AI content, which is “not necessarily any less misleading” than content generated by AI, as well as to audio-only content and videos depicting people doing things they never actually said or did. More

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      Tech firms sign ‘reasonable precautions’ to stop AI-generated election chaos

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      Major technology companies signed a pact Friday to voluntarily adopt “reasonable precautions” to prevent artificial intelligence tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world.Executives from Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and TikTok gathered at the Munich Security Conference to announce a new framework for how they respond to AI-generated deepfakes that deliberately trick voters. Twelve other companies – including Elon Musk’s X – are also signing on to the accord.“Everybody recognizes that no one tech company, no one government, no one civil society organization is able to deal with the advent of this technology and its possible nefarious use on their own,” said Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, in an interview ahead of the summit.The accord is largely symbolic, but targets increasingly realistic AI-generated images, audio and video “that deceptively fake or alter the appearance, voice, or actions of political candidates, election officials, and other key stakeholders in a democratic election, or that provide false information to voters about when, where, and how they can lawfully vote”.The companies aren’t committing to ban or remove deepfakes. Instead, the accord outlines methods they will use to try to detect and label deceptive AI content when it is created or distributed on their platforms. It notes the companies will share best practices with each other and provide “swift and proportionate responses” when that content starts to spread.The vagueness of the commitments and lack of any binding requirements likely helped win over a diverse swath of companies, but disappointed advocates were looking for stronger assurances.“The language isn’t quite as strong as one might have expected,” said Rachel Orey, senior associate director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “I think we should give credit where credit is due, and acknowledge that the companies do have a vested interest in their tools not being used to undermine free and fair elections. That said, it is voluntary, and we’ll be keeping an eye on whether they follow through.”Clegg said each company “quite rightly has its own set of content policies”.“This is not attempting to try to impose a straitjacket on everybody,” he said. “And in any event, no one in the industry thinks that you can deal with a whole new technological paradigm by sweeping things under the rug and trying to play Whac-a-Mole and finding everything that you think may mislead someone.”Several political leaders from Europe and the US also joined Friday’s announcement. Vera Jourová, the European Commission vice-president, said while such an agreement can’t be comprehensive, “it contains very impactful and positive elements”. She also urged fellow politicians to take responsibility to not use AI tools deceptively and warned that AI-fueled disinformation could bring about “the end of democracy, not only in the EU member states”.The agreement at the German city’s annual security meeting comes as more than 50 countries are due to hold national elections in 2024. Bangladesh, Taiwan, Pakistan and most recently Indonesia have already done so.Attempts at AI-generated election interference have already begun, such as when AI robocalls that mimicked the US president Joe Biden’s voice tried to discourage people from voting in New Hampshire’s primary election last month.Just days before Slovakia’s elections in November, AI-generated audio recordings impersonated a candidate discussing plans to raise beer prices and rig the election. Fact-checkers scrambled to identify them as false as they spread across social media.Politicians also have experimented with the technology, from using AI chatbots to communicate with voters to adding AI-generated images to ads.The accord calls on platforms to “pay attention to context and in particular to safeguarding educational, documentary, artistic, satirical, and political expression”.It said the companies will focus on transparency to users about their policies and work to educate the public about how they can avoid falling for AI fakes.Most companies have previously said they’re putting safeguards on their own generative AI tools that can manipulate images and sound, while also working to identify and label AI-generated content so that social media users know if what they’re seeing is real. But most of those proposed solutions haven’t yet rolled out and the companies have faced pressure to do more.That pressure is heightened in the US, where Congress has yet to pass laws regulating AI in politics, leaving companies to largely govern themselves.The Federal Communications Commission recently confirmed AI-generated audio clips in robocalls are against the law, but that doesn’t cover audio deepfakes when they circulate on social media or in campaign advertisements.Many social media companies already have policies in place to deter deceptive posts about electoral processes – AI-generated or not. Meta says it removes misinformation about “the dates, locations, times, and methods for voting, voter registration, or census participation” as well as other false posts meant to interfere with someone’s civic participation.Jeff Allen, co-founder of the Integrity Institute and a former Facebook data scientist, said the accord seems like a “positive step” but he’d still like to see social media companies taking other actions to combat misinformation, such as building content recommendation systems that don’t prioritize engagement above all else.Lisa Gilbert, executive vice-president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, argued Friday that the accord is “not enough” and AI companies should “hold back technology” such as hyper-realistic text-to-video generators “until there are substantial and adequate safeguards in place to help us avert many potential problems”.In addition to the companies that helped broker Friday’s agreement, other signatories include chatbot developers Anthropic and Inflection AI; voice-clone startup ElevenLabs; chip designer Arm Holdings; security companies McAfee and TrendMicro; and Stability AI, known for making the image-generator Stable Diffusion.Notably absent is another popular AI image-generator, Midjourney. The San Francisco-based startup didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.The inclusion of X – not mentioned in an earlier announcement about the pending accord – was one of the surprises of Friday’s agreement. Musk sharply curtailed content-moderation teams after taking over the former Twitter and has described himself as a “free-speech absolutist”.In a statement Friday, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said “every citizen and company has a responsibility to safeguard free and fair elections”.“X is dedicated to playing its part, collaborating with peers to combat AI threats while also protecting free speech and maximizing transparency,” she said. More

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      When dead children are just the price of doing business, Zuckerberg’s apology is empty | Carole Cadwalladr

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      I don’t generally approve of blood sports but I’m happy to make an exception for the hunting and baiting of Silicon Valley executives in a congressional committee room. But then I like expensive, pointless spectacles. And waterboarding tech CEOs in Congress is right up there with firework displays, a brief, thrillingly meaningless sensation on the retina and then darkness.Last week’s grilling of Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Silicon Valley Übermenschen was a classic of the genre: front pages, headlines, and a genuinely stand-out moment of awkwardness in which he was forced to face victims for the first time ever and apologise: stricken parents holding the photographs of their dead children lost to cyberbullying and sexual exploitation on his platform.Less than six hours later, his company delivered its quarterly results, Meta’s stock price surged by 20.3% delivering a $200bn bump to the company’s market capitalisation and, if you’re counting, which as CEO he presumably does, a $700m sweetener for Zuckerberg himself. Those who listened to the earnings call tell me there was no mention of dead children.A day later, Biden announced, “If you harm an American, we will respond”, and dropped missiles on more than 80 targets across Syria and Iraq. Sure bro, just so long as the Americans aren’t teenagers with smart phones. US tech companies routinely harm Americans, and in particular, American children, though to be fair they routinely harm all other nationalities’ children too: the Wall Street Journal has shown Meta’s algorithms enable paedophiles to find each other. New Mexico’s attorney general is suing the company for being the “largest marketplace for predators and paedophiles globally”. A coroner in Britain found that 14-year-old Molly Jane Russell, “died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content” – which included Instagram videos depicting suicide.And while dispatching a crack squad of Navy Seals to Menlo Park might be too much to hope for, there are other responses that the US Congress could have mandated, such as, here’s an idea, a law. Any law. One that, say, prohibits tech companies from treating dead children as just a cost of doing business.Because demanding that tech companies don’t enable paedophiles to find and groom children is the lowest of all low-hanging fruit in the tech regulation space. And yet even that hasn’t happened yet. What America urgently needs is to act on its anti-trust laws and break up these companies as a first basic step. It needs to take an axe to Section 230, the law that gives platforms immunity from lawsuits for hosting harmful or illegal content.It needs basic product safety legislation. Imagine GlaxoSmithKline launched an experimental new wonder drug last year. A drug that has shown incredible benefits, including curing some forms of cancer and slowing down ageing. It might also cause brain haemorrhages and abort foetuses, but the data on that is not yet in so we’ll just have to wait and see. There’s a reason that doesn’t happen. They’re called laws. Drug companies go through years of testing. Because they have to. Because at some point, a long time ago, Congress and other legislatures across the world did their job.Yet Silicon Valley’s latest extremely disruptive technology, generative AI, was released into the wild last year without even the most basic federally mandated product testing. Last week, deep fake porn images of the most famous female star on the planet, Taylor Swift, flooded social media platforms, which had no legal obligation to take them down – and hence many of them didn’t.But who cares? It’s only violence being perpetrated against a woman. It’s only non-consensual sexual assault, algorithmically distributed to millions of people across the planet. Punishing women is the first step in the rollout of any disruptive new technology, so get used to that, and if you think deep fakes are going to stop with pop stars, good luck with that too.You thought misinformation during the US election and Brexit vote in 2016 was bad? Well, let’s wait and see what 2024 has to offer. Could there be any possible downside to releasing this untested new technology – one that enables the creation of mass disinformation at scale for no cost – at the exact moment in which more people will go to the polls than at any time in history?You don’t actually have to imagine where that might lead because it’s already happened. A deep fake targeting a progressive candidate dropped days before the Slovakian general election in October. It’s impossible to know what impact it had or who created it, but the candidate lost, and the opposition pro-Putin candidate won. CNN reports that the messaging of the deepfake echoed that put out by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, just an hour before it dropped. And where was Facebook in all of this, you ask? Where it usually is, refusing to take many of the deep fake posts down.Back in Congress, grilling tech execs is something to do to fill the time in between the difficult job of not passing tech legislation. It’s now six years since the Cambridge Analytica scandal when Zuckerberg became the first major tech executive to be commanded to appear before Congress. That was a revelation because it felt like Facebook might finally be brought to heel.But Wednesday’s outing was Zuckerberg’s eighth. And neither Facebook, nor any other tech platform, has been brought to heel. The US has passed not a single federal law. Meanwhile, Facebook has done some exculpatory techwashing of its name to remove the stench of data scandals and Kremlin infiltration and occasionally offers up its CEO for a ritual slaughtering on the Senate floor.To understand America’s end-of-empire waning dominance in the world, its broken legislature and its capture by corporate interests, the symbolism of a senator forcing Zuckerberg to apologise to bereaved parents while Congress – that big white building stormed by insurrectionists who found each other on social media platforms – does absolutely nothing to curb his company’s singular power is as good as any place to start.We’ve had eight years to learn the lessons of 2016 and yet here we are. Britain has responded by weakening the body that protects our elections and degrading our data protection laws to “unlock post-Brexit opportunities”. American congressional committees are now a cargo cult that go through ritualised motions of accountability. Meanwhile, there’s a new tech wonder drug on the market that may create untold economic opportunities or lethal bioweapons and the destabilisation of what is left of liberal democracy. Probably both. Carole Cadwalladr is a reporter and feature writer for the Observer More