As voters will head to polls this yr in additional than 50 international locations, specialists have raised the alarm over AI-generated political disinformation and the prospect that malicious actors will use generative AI and social media to intrude with elections. Meta has beforehand confronted criticism over its content material moderation insurance policies round previous elections—for instance, when it failed to forestall the January 6 rioters from organizing on its platforms. 

Clegg defended the corporate’s efforts at stopping violent teams from organizing, however he additionally pressured the issue of maintaining. “It is a extremely adversarial house. You play Whack-a-Mole, candidly. You take away one group, they rename themselves, rebrand themselves, and so forth,” he stated. 

Clegg argued that in contrast with 2016, the corporate is now “completely totally different” in the case of moderating election content material. Since then, it has eliminated over 200 “networks of coordinated inauthentic habits,” he stated. The corporate now depends on truth checkers and AI know-how to establish undesirable teams on its platforms. 

Earlier this yr, Meta introduced it could label AI-generated pictures on Fb, Instagram, and Threads. Meta has began including seen markers to such pictures, in addition to invisible watermarks and metadata within the picture file. The watermarks shall be added to pictures created utilizing Meta’s generative AI techniques or ones that carry invisible industry-standard markers. The corporate says its measures are according to greatest practices laid out by the Partnership on AI, an AI analysis nonprofit.

However on the identical time, Clegg admitted that instruments to detect AI-generated content material are nonetheless imperfect and immature. Watermarks in AI techniques are usually not adopted industry-wide, and they’re simple to tamper with. They’re additionally arduous to implement robustly in AI-generated textual content, audio, and video. 

In the end that ought to not matter, Clegg stated, as a result of Meta’s techniques ought to be capable to catch and detect mis- and disinformation no matter its origins. 

“AI is a sword and a defend on this,” he stated.

Clegg additionally defended the corporate’s choice to permit adverts claiming that the 2020 US election was stolen, noting that these sorts of claims are frequent all through the world and saying it’s “not possible” for Meta to relitigate previous elections. Simply this month, eight state secretaries of state wrote a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arguing that the adverts may nonetheless be harmful, and that they’ve the potential to additional threaten public belief in elections and the security of particular person election staff.

You may watch the total interview with Nick Clegg and MIT Expertise Assessment government editor Amy Nordrum under.