A gaggle of 20 tech firms announced on Friday they’ve agreed to work together to prevent deceptive artificial-intelligence content from interfering with elections across the globe this 12 months.
The rapid growth of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which might create text, images and video in seconds in response to prompts, has heightened fears that the brand new technology might be used to sway major elections this 12 months, as greater than half of the world’s population is ready to head to the polls.
Signatories of the tech accord, which was announced on the Munich Security Conference, include firms which might be constructing generative AI models used to create content, including OpenAI, Microsoft and Adobe.
Other signatories include social media platforms that may face the challenge of keeping harmful content off their sites, corresponding to Meta Platforms, TikTok and X, formerly often known as Twitter.
The agreement includes commitments to collaborate on developing tools for detecting misleading AI-generated images, video and audio, creating public awareness campaigns to educate voters on deceptive content and taking motion on such content on their services.
Technology to discover AI-generated content or certify its origin could include watermarking or embedding metadata, the businesses said.
The accord didn’t specify a timeline for meeting the commitments or how each company would implement them.
“I believe the utility of this (accord) is the breadth of the businesses signing up to it,” said Nick Clegg, president of world affairs at Meta Platforms.
“It’s all good and well if individual platforms develop latest policies of detection, provenance, labeling, watermarking and so on, but unless there’s a wider commitment to accomplish that in a shared interoperable way, we’re going to be stuck with a hodgepodge of various commitments,” Clegg said.
Generative AI is already getting used to influence politics and even persuade people not to vote.
In January, a robocall using fake audio of President Biden circulated to Recent Hampshire voters, urging them to stay home through the state’s presidential primary election.
Despite the recognition of text-generation tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the tech firms will give attention to stopping harmful effects of AI photos, videos and audio, partly because people tend to have more skepticism with text, said Dana Rao, Adobe’s chief trust officer, in an interview.
“There’s an emotional connection to audio, video and images,” he said. “Your brain is wired to consider that sort of media.”