Meta will label AI-generated images on Facebook and Instagram
Paris: Cairopost, Rueters
Users of Facebook and Instagram will soon be able to name AI-generated photographs that show up in their feeds as part of a larger tech industry effort to distinguish between real and fake.
On Tuesday, Meta announced that it is developing technological standards with industry partners to facilitate the identification of photos and, in the future, audio and video produced by artificial intelligence systems.
It remains to be seen how well it will function in an era where creating and disseminating AI-generated material that can do harm, from nonconsensual phone photos of celebrities to election misinformation, will be easier than ever.
“It’s kind of a signal that they’re taking seriously the fact that generation of fake content online is an issue for their platforms,” said Gili Vidan, an assistant professor of information science at Cornell University. It could be “quite effective” in flagging a large portion of AI-generated content made with commercial tools, but it won’t likely catch everything, she said.
Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, didn’t specify Tuesday when the labels would appear but said it will be “in the coming months” and in different languages, noting that a “number of important elections are taking place around the world.”
Meta already puts an “Imagined with AI” label on photorealistic images made by its own tool, but most of the AI-generated content flooding its social media services comes from elsewhere.
A number of tech industry collaborations, including the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative, have been working to set standards. A push for digital watermarking and labeling of AI-generated content was also part of an executive order that U.S. President Joe Biden signed in October.
Clegg said that Meta will be working to label “images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney, and Shutterstock as they implement their plans for adding metadata to images created by their tools.”
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan reiterated onTuesday that , In the coming months, we’ll introduce labels that inform viewers when the realistic content they’re seeing is synthetic,”
