The news: Google will require political ads to reveal whether they were created using artificial intelligence starting in November, the BBC reports, a year before the 2024 US presidential election.
- Although Google already has rules prohibiting misleading ads related to politics or social issues, political ads will need to add “visible” information, such as on-screen text clarifying when an image or sound is “synthetically generated.” .
Why is this important: Artificial intelligence has already been used by prominent presidential candidates to create misleading images, raising concerns that the technology could be used to manipulate voters. Google is poised to capture a greater share of political ad spending in 2024 and will need to address these concerns to avoid possible sanctions.
- Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis“The campaign used AI to create at least two ads with misleading images of the former president Donald Trump. One of them depicted Trump hugging Anthony Fauci, and another in July used AI to imitate Trump’s voice reading his tweets. While AI voice falls into a gray area, deepfake images are already prohibited by Google’s advertising rules.
- Political misinformation on digital platforms during the last two presidential elections and the pandemic have subjected companies like Google to increased scrutiny, forcing them to update their rules to better cover misinformation. Today, there are concerns about the ability of platforms to handle a wave of AI-generated content.
- But as political spending is expected to reach a a historic high of $11 billion in 2024, Google has relaxed its rules somewhat. In June, Youtube overturned a policy which banned content alleging fraud in the 2020 presidential election, a controversial move that followed the entry of several prominent election deniers like Robert Kennedy Jr. into the Republican primary.
Our opinion : As the leading platform in the race for artificial intelligence, Google is under as much pressure to show that it can moderate misleading AI-generated content as it is to show that it can push the technology to new horizons .
- Stricter rules around AI-generated ads, especially in thorny industries like politics, are important not only for getting a greater share of political ad spending, but also for the future of the technology.
