The EU plans to push companies to better moderate misleading content, including deepfakes, through laws such as the Digital Services Act, a major content moderation law that comes into full force on Saturday. The EU’s cybersecurity agency will also present a manual to national election authorities at the end of February on how to prevent AI from disrupting June’s EU vote.
“Countries were at a loss as to what to make of this,” said one EU diplomat, who granted anonymity to discuss confidential talks. You can’t just sign it,” he said.
“The European Commission is ready to do its own job,” said Jourova, who has led the EU’s efforts to combat disinformation for the past few years. She welcomed the industry agreement, saying: “The combination of AI with the aim of disinformation campaigns could spell the end of democracy, not just in EU member states.”
Meanwhile, Warner said that if there is “massive foreign malign influence” seen in any of the 2024 elections, the potential for AI “will be wiped out because I think people will react to over-regulation.” “It is very important that technology companies respect voluntary efforts,” he said. environment. “
Some companies have announced separate plans in recent weeks to label and remove political deepfakes that seek to mislead voters.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E, pledged in January to enhance its tools to flag AI-created content and direct ChatGPT to promote accurate information about voting procedures. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced earlier this month that it would ramp up efforts to label all images created with AI.
For some in the technology industry, the Tech Accord initiative diverts attention from reining in technology companies through regulation and oversight.
Meredith Whitaker, co-founder of the AI Now Institute, told POLITICO this week that democracies are “long past the time when we could leave it to corporations to self-regulate.”