A coalition led by OpenAI, Amazon.com Inc., Google, and seventeen other prominent players in the artificial intelligence space has been established to try and stop the use of AI to manipulate voters in the upcoming international elections.
The companies pledged to try and identify AI-enabled election misinformation, respond to it, and increase public awareness about the possibility of deception when they announced the agreement on Friday at the Munich Security Conference.
The proliferation of AI has made producing realistic fake images, audio and videos widely accessible, raising fears that the technology will be used to mislead voters in a year when elections will determine the leadership of 40% of the world’s population. Last month, an AI-generated audio message that sounded like President Joe Biden attempted to dissuade Democrats from voting in the New Hampshire primary election.
The companies pledged to use technology to mitigate the risks of AI-generated election content in the agreement, named the “Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections.” They also committed to share information with each other about how to address bad actors.
“AI didn’t create election deception, but we must ensure it doesn’t help deception flourish,” Microsoft Corp.’s President Brad Smith said in the press release announcing the accord.
Adobe Inc., ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok and International Business Machines Corp., as well as startups such as Anthropic and Inflection AI, were among the signers. The agreement also included social media companies Meta Platforms Inc., X and Snap Inc.
“The intentional and undisclosed generation and distribution of deceptive AI election content can deceive the public in ways that jeopardize the integrity of electoral processes,” the accord said.
The new agreement aims to limit digital content that mimics the words or actions of political candidates and other election participants, given the proliferation of realistic fakes of candidates’ voices and likenesses.
Nonetheless, a lot of tech firms claim to be concerned about the possibility of political misappropriation of content produced by AI. At first, a Meta-developed system will only be able to identify fake images—not audio or video—and it might overlook ones that have had their watermarks removed.
“Our mind is not at ease,” OpenAI’s Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said last month at a Bloomberg event at the World Economic Forum. “We’re going to have to watch this incredibly closely this year.”
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