Meta has announced a plan to label AI-generated images that appear on Instagram and Facebook feeds as part of a broader tech industry initiative to sort between what’s real and not.
The company’s president of global affairs, Nick Cleg announced this in a blogpost on Tuesday, saying it’s working with industry partners on technical standards that will make it easier to identify images and eventually video and audio generated by artificial intelligence tools.
“It’s kind of a signal that they’re taking seriously the fact that generation of fake content online is an issue for their platforms,” said Gili Vidan, an assistant professor of information science at Cornell University.
It could be “quite effective” in flagging a large portion of AI-generated content made with commercial tools, but it won’t likely catch everything, she said.
Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, didn’t specify when the labels would appear but said it will be “in the coming months” and in different languages, noting that a “number of important elections are taking place around the world.”
“As the difference between human and synthetic content gets blurred, people want to know where the boundary lies,” he said in a blog post.
Meta already puts an “Imagined with AI” label on photorealistic images made by its own tool, but most of the AI-generated content flooding its social media services comes from elsewhere.
Several tech industry collaborations, including the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative, have been working to set standards. A push for digital watermarking and labeling of AI-generated content was also part of an executive order that U.S. President Joe Biden signed in October.
Clegg said that Meta will be working to label “images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney, and Shutterstock as they implement their plans for adding metadata to images created by their tools.”