Meta has made the decision to block political campaigns and advertisers from using its new generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) advertising tech.

The news was confirmed by a spokesperson to Reuters, with the company setting boundaries for the use of its new AI-powered ad tools that can instantly create backgrounds, image adjustments and copy off the back of simple text prompts.

The tools were initially made available to a small group of advertisers, but are scheduled to be broadly available by 2024.

The newswire reports that Meta posted an update to its help centre on Monday, which stated: "As we continue to test new Generative AI ads creation tools in Ads Manager, advertisers running campaigns that qualify as ads for Housing, Employment or Credit or Social Issues, Elections, or Politics, or related to Health, Pharmaceuticals or Financial Services aren't currently permitted to use these Generative AI features.

"We believe this approach will allow us to better understand potential risks and build the right safeguards for the use of Generative AI in ads that relate to potentially sensitive topics in regulated industries.”

The announcement comes at a time when lawmakers are concerned over the AI’s power to ‘turbo-charge’ the spread of misinformation.

Alphabet-owned Google made a similar decision last week when it launched its own GenAI ad tools and said that it plans to block a list of “political keywords” from being used as prompts. Political advertisers however will still be able to use the tech, unlike on Meta platforms.

Meta and other tech companies have raced to launch generative AI ad products and virtual assistants in recent months in response to the frenzy over the debut last year of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, which can provide human-like written responses to questions and other prompts.

Other social media giants like TikTok, Snapchat and Twitter – now known as X – are yet to launch GenAI ad tools.

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