Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is barring political campaigns and other advertisers from using its artificial intelligence (AI) tools for advertising, a company spokesperson said.
"While we continue to test the new generic AI creation tools in Ads Manager, advertisers running campaigns that qualify as ads for housing, employment, credit or social issues, elections, politics, or related to health, pharmaceuticals and financial services are currently not allowed to use those AI services", the company announced, reports N1
We believe this approach will allow us to better understand the potential risks and build the right safeguards in the use of AI in ads related to potentially sensitive topics in regulated industries, it added.
The decision comes a month after Meta, the second-largest digital advertising platform, announced it would expand advertisers' access to AI tools that can create backgrounds, adjust images and vary ad text based on simple text tasks.
At the beginning, since spring, these tools were available only to a small group of advertisers. They should be available worldwide next year, the company said at the time.
Meta and other tech companies are racing to launch generative AI products and virtual assistants in response to OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT, which provides human-like answers to user questions and other tasks.
The companies have so far released little information about the security measures they will introduce over those systems, so Meta's decision to ban use in political advertising is one of the most significant measures so far.
Alphabet's Google, the world's largest digital advertising company, announced the launch of a similar AI tool last Sunday. It also plans to exclude politics from the feature, blocking "political keywords," a Google spokesman told Reuters.
TikTok bans political ads and Snapchat blocks them in its AI bot.
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