About twenty technology companies have announced that they will collaborate this year to stop misleading content generated by artificial intelligence. A group led by OpenAI has targeted the fight against misinformation in the elections to be held in 2024 in more than 50 countries. They are choices that include almost half the population of planets.
This Friday the agreement was announced on the first day of the Munich Security Conference. The list of participants includes developers and various social media platforms, such as Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, X (Twitter), and TikTok.
The voluntary agreement recognized that the rapid development of artificial intelligence “creates both new opportunities and challenges for the democratic process”. In this sense, the spread is Misleading content could “compromise the integrity of electoral processes”.
Companies put a magnifying glass on increasingly realistic images, sounds, and videos generated by new artificial intelligence tools.
However, these technologies did not commit to a ban or removal of deepfakes. Instead, they implement some methods to detect and flag this type of content when it is created or distributed on their platforms. For example, the implementation of watermarks or the ability to insert metadata.
A token commitment to AI and elections
“I think the usefulness of this agreement is in the breadth of the companies that signed it,” said Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta Platforms. “Everybody recognizes that no technology company, no government, no civil society organization is capable of dealing with the advent of this technology and its potential harmful uses alone,” Clegg added.
The agreement between these companies specifies that they will share best practices with each other. They ensure that they provide “swift and proportionate responses” when misleading AI-generated content begins to spread. However, the companies did not specify more details on how they would keep these spaces. They did not even propose a schedule of events.
For this reason, some organizations and activists have already characterized the agreement as vague and merely symbolic.”The language is not as strong as one might expect,” Rachel Orey, director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan American Policy Center, told the AP.
One of the votes planned for this year is the presidential election in the United States. Already last year, the Republican Party published material generated by artificial intelligence challenge President Joe Biden, a candidate for re-election. In January of last year, voters in New Hampshire received a robocall with the voice of an individual claiming to be Biden. In this deceptive communication, they were instructed not to vote in the primary election.
Several of the companies that signed the agreement have already announced their own steps to address the unpredictable situation due to the election. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, announced that he would ban politicians Use their tools for their campaigns. And TikTok said so this week will create polling centers that will monitor your contributions during the upcoming European Parliament elections.