The News: On December 19, Susan Jasper, VP of Trust and Safety Solutions at Google published a blog post outlining Google’s efforts to combat misuse and abuse of Google products and services, particularly those leveraging or related to generative AI, during the upcoming election cycles in 2024. Here are the key details:
- With recent advances in its large language models (LLMs), Google is experimenting with building faster, more adaptable enforcement systems for long-standing policies and software used to identify and remove content that uses AI classifiers.
- Prioritized testing for safety risks, from cybersecurity vulnerabilities to misinformation and fairness for generative AI products, Bard and Search Generative Experience (SGE).
- Restricting the types of election-related queries for which Bard and SGE will return responses.
- Requiring election advertisers to disclose when their ads include realistic synthetic content that has been digitally altered or generated including by AI tools.
- YouTube will require creators to disclose when they have created realistic altered or synthetic content and will display a label that indicates for people when the content they are watching is synthetic.
- About this Result provides context in SGE, and the double-check feature in Bard enables people to evaluate whether there is content across the web to substantiate Bard’s English language response.
- About this image in Search helps people assess the credibility and context of images found online.
- SynthID, a tool in beta from Google DeepMind, directly embeds a digital watermark into AI-generated images and audio.
Read the announcement on Google’s Safety Initiatives here.
Google Announces Strategies to Combat Misuse of AI in 2024 Elections
Analyst Take: The confluence of current divisive politics around the world with powerful but minimally controlled generative AI could make for trouble. As the world’s largest search engine, and an AI leader, Google is in a position to have a positive impact on the 2024 elections. Here are my thoughts.
Taking Google Generative AI Products Out of the Election Equation
Taking Bard and SGE out of the election equation is a leadership move that was probably not made easily. According to AdImpact, 2024 political advertising spend for digital ads in the US in 2024 will reach $1.2 billion. While Bard and SGE might be responsible for a portion of that potential ad revenue to Google, it is still a significant ad revenue opportunity Google will forego. The negative impact Bard and SGE could have in spreading misinformation and disinformation outweighed the revenue upside. Hopefully, other digital players will follow Google’s lead and shut down the use of generative AI tools for political search.
Disclosure, Content Filtering, Source Tagging, and Watermarking Combating AI-Generated Content
Google is deploying a range of strategies to ensure AI-generated content is traceable and identifiable, as noted in the earlier bullet points.
Google is also using AI to combat the misuse of AI in creating misinformation, disinformation, and deepfakes. It is interesting that the advancement of Google’s internal LLM work pays off in ways the company might not have anticipated, particularly super-charging its content filtering. Note:
“To safeguard our platforms, we have long standing policies that inform how we approach areas like manipulated media, hate and harassment, incitement to violence, and demonstrably false claims that could undermine democratic processes. For over a decade, we’ve leveraged machine learning classifiers and AI to identify and remove content that violates these policies. And now, with the recent advances in our Large Language Models (LLMs), we’re experimenting with building faster and more adaptable enforcement systems. Early results indicate that this will enable us to remain nimble and take action even more quickly when new threats emerge.”
Conclusion
For good and for bad, AI is going to play a role in the 2024 elections around the world. Google is taking steps to combat the misuse of AI on its platforms. Could it do more? Maybe, but the company has outlined a pretty comprehensive plan, and it should serve as a blueprint to other digital platforms who would do well to follow their lead.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Based in Tampa, Florida, Mark is a veteran market research analyst with 25 years of experience interpreting technology business and holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Florida.
