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Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) is restricting political campaigns and advertisers in other regulated industries from using its new generative AI advertising products, Reuters reported
The move denies access to these tools that lawmakers have warned could speed up spread of election misinformation.
Meta’s advertising standards prohibit ads with content which have been debunked by the company’s fact-checking partners, however do not have any rules specifically on AI, the report added.
“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,” Meta said in a note appended to several pages explaining how the tools work.
The company added that it thinks this approach will help them better understand potential risks and develop the right safeguards for the use of Generative AI in ads which are related to potentially sensitive topics in regulated industries.
The policy update comes a month after the tech giant noted that it was starting to expand advertisers’ access to AI-powered advertising tools which can create backgrounds, image adjustments and variations of ad copy via simple text prompts, according to the report added.
The company had noted at that time that the features would initially be available only to a small group of advertisers beginning in the spring but it is on track to roll out the tools to all advertisers worldwide by next year.
Last week, Alphabet’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) unit Google unveiled similar image-customizing generative AI ads tools. However, the company intends to keep politics out of its products by blocking a list of “political keywords” from being utilized as prompts, a Google spokesperson had told the news agency.
TikTok and Snap’s (SNAP) Snapchat both restrict political ads, the report added.
Generative AI services have taken the world by storm, since the launch of Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT last year. Globally, companies have launched their own large language models, or LLMs, which can provide services such as content and image generation, to name a few.