Social networking giant Meta is working to identify and label artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images across Facebook, Instagram and Threads as part of its efforts to identify and expose "individuals and organisations actively seeking to deceive people", this year, when both India and the US go to elections. The Facebook parent, on Tuesday announced it was working with industry partners on common technical standards for identifying AI content, including video and audio.
The Facebook parent is building tools that can identify invisible markers at scale -- specifically, the “AI generated” information in the C2PA and IPTC technical standards -- so that it can label images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney as well as Shutterstock as they implement their plans for adding metadata to images created by their tools.
"...That’s why we’ve been working with industry partners to align on common technical standards that signal when a piece of content has been created using AI. Being able to detect these signals will make it possible for us to label AI-generated images that users post to Facebook, Instagram and Threads. We’re building this capability now, and in the coming months we’ll start applying labels in all languages supported by each app," Nick Clegg, President, Global Affairs, Meta, wrote in a blog post.
"We’re taking this approach through the next year, during which a number of important elections are taking place around the world. During this time, we expect to learn much more about how people are creating and sharing AI content, what sort of transparency people find most valuable, and how these technologies evolve. What we learn will inform industry best practices and our own approach going forward," Clegg added.
This announcement comes at a time when the difference between human and synthetic content gets blurred, and people want to know where the boundary lies and the governments battling to check the spread of deepfakes and AI-generated content. Also, there are people are often coming across AI-generated content for the first time.
"So it’s important that we help people know when photorealistic content they’re seeing has been created using AI. We do that by applying “Imagined with AI” labels to photorealistic images created using our Meta AI feature, but we want to be able to do this with content created with other companies’ tools too," Clegg further noted.