Political marketers are prohibited from employing generative AI ad solutions, according to Exclusive-Meta

A company spokesperson said on Monday that Facebook owner Meta (NASDAQ:META) is barring political campaigns and advertisers in other regulated industries from using its new generative AI advertising products, denying access to tools that lawmakers have warned could accelerate the spread of election misinformation.

Following the publication of this report, Meta made the decision public in revisions to their help center on Monday night. Its advertising policies forbid ads with content that has been discredited by the company's fact-checking partners, but there are no AI-specific limitations.

"As we continue to test new Generative AI ad creation tools in Ads Manager, advertisers running campaigns that qualify as ads for Housing, Employment, or Credit, Social Issues, Elections, or Politics, or related to Health, Pharmaceuticals, or Financial Services aren't currently permitted to use these Generative AI features," the company said in a note appended to several pages explaining how the tools work.

"We believe this approach will allow us to better understand potential risks and build the right safeguards for the use of Generative AI in ads that relate to potentially sensitive topics in regulated industries," according to the statement.

The policy change comes a month after Meta, the world's second-largest digital advertising platform, announced that it would begin to expand advertisers' access to AI-powered advertising tools that can instantly create backgrounds, image adjustments, and ad copy variations in response to simple text prompts.

Starting in the spring, the tools were initially offered only to a restricted number of advertisers. According to the corporation, they are on schedule to be available to all advertisers worldwide by next year.

In the aftermath of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, which can create human-like written responses to inquiries and other prompts, Meta and other tech companies have rushed to launch generative AI ad solutions and virtual assistants in recent months.

The businesses have disclosed scant information about the safety safeguards they want to apply on such systems, making Meta's decision on political advertisements one of the industry's most significant AI policy decisions to date.

Last week, Alphabet's (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google, the world's largest digital advertising company, announced the release of similar image-customizing generative AI advertisements capabilities. According to a Google spokeswoman, the company intends to keep politics out of its products by prohibiting the use of a list of "political keywords" as suggestions.

Google is also planning a policy modification in mid-November that will require election-related ads to carry a disclosure if they feature "synthetic content that inauthentically depicts real or realistic-looking people or events."

TikTok and Snapchat owner Snap both prohibit political advertisements, while X, formerly known as Twitter, has not released any generative AI advertising capabilities.

Nick Clegg, Meta's chief policy officer, stated last month that the use of generative AI in political advertising was "clearly an area where we need to update our rules."

He warned, ahead of a recent AI safety forum in the UK, that governments and internet corporations should be prepared for the technology to be used to meddle in next elections in 2024, calling for a special focus on election-related content "that moves from one platform to the other."

Clegg previously told Reuters that Meta was preventing its Meta AI virtual assistant from developing photorealistic representations of popular persons. This summer, Meta committed to creating a mechanism to "watermark" AI-generated material.

With the exception of parody or satire, Meta strictly prohibits deceptive AI-generated video in all content, including organic non-paid uploads.

Last month, the company's independent Oversight Board announced that it will investigate the wisdom of that strategy, taking up a case involving a doctored video of US President Joe Biden that Meta claimed it had left up because it was not AI-generated.