9 November, 2023

Meta Bans Political Advertisers From Using Gen AI Tools

10th December 2021, Dublin, Ireland. The newly named Meta and Facebook European headquarters in Dublin's Grand Canal Square.

Political advertisers have been banned by Meta from using its generative AI tools in a bid to prevent the spread of election misinformation.

Meta announced the change, which also prevents a range of other advertisers from using the tools, via a post on its help centre on Monday night. Meta’s existing advertising standards prohibit ads with content that has been debunked by its fact-checking partners but it does not have any AI-specific rules.

“As we continue to test new Generative AI ads creation tools in Ads Manager, advertisers running campaigns that qualify as ads for Housing, Employment or Credit or Social Issues, Elections, or Politics, or related to Health, Pharmaceuticals or Financial Services aren’t currently permitted to use these Generative AI features,” the company said in a note appended to several pages explaining how the tools work.

“We believe this approach will allow us to better understand potential risks and build the right safeguards for the use of Generative AI in ads that relate to potentially sensitive topics in regulated industries,” it said.

Meta announced that it would be employing generative AI in its advertising products back in April, before revealing the changes in October.

Meta had been testing the features with a small subset of its advertising partners. The company’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, had said that its generative AI tools could be used to improve an advert’s effectiveness by telling the advertiser which tools to use when crafting the ad.

The big tech companies have been wrangling with guardrails for generative AI for some time.

Google announced the launch of similar image-customising generative AI ad tools last week. However, it added a list of “political keywords” that were blocked from being used as prompts, a Google spokesperson told Reuters.

Google has also planned a mid-November policy update to require that election-related ads must include a disclosure if they contain “synthetic content that inauthentically depicts real or realistic-looking people or events.”

TikTok has always banned political ads, while Snap blocks them in its AI chatbot. Snapchat also uses human review to fact-check all political ads, which includes vetting for misleading use of AI. X, previously known as Twitter, has not rolled out any generative AI advertising tools.

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