Meta will start labelling images created with leading artificial intelligence tools in the coming months amid growing worries about the potential for AI to mislead.
Meta, which owns all three platforms, said that it will start labelling images created with leading artificial intelligence tools in the coming months. The move comes as tech companies — both those that build AI software and those that host its outputs — are coming under growing pressure to address the potential for cutting-edge technology to mislead people.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, wrote in a company blog post, “As the difference between human and synthetic content gets blurred, people want to know where the boundary lies. “People are often coming across AI-generated content for the first time and our users have told us they appreciate transparency around this new technology. So it’s important that we help people know when photorealistic content they’re seeing has been created using AI.”
Those concerns are particularly acute as millions of people vote in high-profile elections around the world this year. Experts and regulators have warned that deepfakes — digitally manipulated media — could be used to exacerbate efforts to mislead, discourage and manipulate voters.
The labels will apply to images from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Adobe, Midjourney and Shutterstock — but only once those companies start including watermarks and other technical metadata in images created by their software. Images created with Meta’s own AI tools are already labelled “Imagined with AI.”
That still leaves gaps. Other image generators, including open-source models, may never incorporate these kinds of markers. Meta said it’s working on tools to automatically detect AI content, even if that content doesn’t have watermarks or metadata.
