With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies beginning to stoke fears of increased misinformation, BigTech firms including Microsoft and Google have pledged to help prevent deceptive AI content from interfering in this year’s global elections.

At the Munich Security Conference (MSC) last week, 20 companies signed the “Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections”, a set of commitments to deploy technology countering harmful AI-generated content meant to deceive voters.

Those who signed have pledged to work collaboratively on tools to detect and address online distribution of such AI content, drive educational campaigns, and provide transparency, among other concrete steps.

The accord also includes a broad set of principles, including the importance of tracking the origin of deceptive election-related content and the need to raise public awareness about the problem.

The signatories of the pledge are: Adobe, Amazon, Anthropic, Arm, ElevenLabs, Google, IBM, Inflection AI, LinkedIn, McAfee, Meta, Microsoft, Nota, OpenAI, Snap, Stability AI, TikTok, TrendMicro, Truepic, and X.

The eight specific commitments of the accord are: Developing and implementing technology to mitigate risks related to deceptive AI election content, including open-source tools where appropriate; assessing models in scope of this accord to understand the risks they may present regarding deceptive AI election content; seeking to detect the distribution of this content on their platforms; seeking to appropriately address this content detected on their platforms; fostering cross-industry resilience to deceptive AI election content; providing transparency to the public regarding how the company addresses it; continuing to engage with a diverse set of global civil society organisations and academics, and; supporting efforts to foster public awareness, media literacy, and all-of-society resilience.

The issue of deceptive AI content was once again spotlighted last week when OpenAI announced the creation of Sora, a tool which claims to be able to create photorealistic videos based on text prompts.

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