Meta on Tuesday said that it will start detecting and labelling images generated by other companies’ generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools.

The Facebook operator already labels any content generated by its own tools, and will start identifying images created on services run by Adobe, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Midjourney and Shutterstock in the coming months.

Labels will be added to content posted on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, but it is unclear whether the company will apply labels to content posted on messaging app WhatsApp.

In a blog post, Meta president of global affairs Nick Clegg explained that while he is encouraged by the “explosion” of creativity, “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”.

He added: “We’re taking this approach through the next year, during which a number of important elections are taking place around the world. During this time, we expect to learn much more about how people are creating and sharing AI content, what sort of transparency people find most valuable, and how these technologies evolve. What we learn will inform industry best practices and our own approach going forward.”

The company will deploy tech that can identify invisible markers built into images generated by AI, but the former Liberal Democrat party leader said that companies behind audio and video generation AI are yet to include these kinds of signals in their generators.

“While the industry works towards this capability, we’re adding a feature for people to disclose when they share AI-generated video or audio so we can add a label to it,” he wrote. “We’ll require people to use this disclosure and label tool when they post organic content with a photorealistic video or realistic-sounding audio that was digitally created or altered, and we may apply penalties if they fail to do so.”

In an interview with Reuters, Clegg warned that the “ship has sailed” on creating a viable way of labelling written text generated by AI tools like ChatGPT.

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