Meta bans political ads using AI tools

This is new information revealed by a Meta spokesperson, thereby showing that Meta wants to prevent election campaigns from accessing these tools.

Meta, which operates the world’s second-largest digital advertising platform, has not yet announced the decision in updates to its advertising guidelines, which already prohibit ads with content removed by Meta’s fact-checkers but do not specifically address AI.

The move comes just a month after Meta announced it was expanding its AI-powered ad tools to advertisers, which can instantly create backgrounds, adjust images, and create different versions of ads with simple commands. The tools were initially available to a small group of advertisers this spring, and Meta is planning to make them available to all advertisers globally by 2024.

Meta and other tech companies have raced to launch AI-powered assistants and advertising products in recent months. But the companies have provided little information about how they ensure the safety of these systems. So Meta’s decision to restrict political advertising using AI tools is one of the first significant policy decisions involving the technology to date.

Last month, Meta’s chief policy officer Nick Clegg said the use of generative AI in political advertising was clearly an area that needed a regulatory update. Ahead of the first Global AI Summit in the UK last week, he also warned that governments and tech companies needed to prepare for the technology being used to interfere in upcoming elections, calling for a special focus on election-related content. Mr Clegg also said Meta had blocked its Meta AI assistant from creating images of public figures. Meta pledged to develop a system to specifically filter AI-generated content.