Facebook announces major change ahead of big election year over fears of ‘AI deception’

FACEBOOK will begin to flag AI-created images to users ahead of election season amid fears that deepfakes will be used to sway voters.

Meta, Facebook and Instagram's parent company, says it will label photorealistic images created using Meta AI since with the tag: “Imagined with AI”.

The label aims to make social media users aware that certain posts are machine generated, and not real.

However, current technology and practices mean Meta can only pin this label onto images created by its own AI image generator, called Llama.

Although the tech giant is apparently working with industry partners on a universal standard for identifying content made by other companies' AI tools.

This includes video and audio, as well as images.

"As the difference between human and synthetic content gets blurred, people want to know where the boundary lies," Nick Clegg, President of Global Affairs at Meta, said in the announcement.

"People are often coming across AI-generated content for the first time and our users have told us they appreciate transparency around this new technology.

"So it’s important that we help people know when photorealistic content they’re seeing has been created using AI."

The label will be rolled out across Facebook, Instagram and Threads "in the coming months".

AI clones, also known as deepfakes, have already been used to impersonate politicians during election years.

A month before the UK's General Election in 2019, a deepfake video of Jeremy Corbyn backing rival Boris Johnson went viral online.