Meta has announced that their social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and Threads – will now detect and label all AI-generated images, even those created by alternative AI tools.

While Meta already labels images generated using their own AI tools, their detection and labelling system will be expanded to include all AI-generated images across their various social media platforms.

With the new system, Meta plans to be able to identify and label AI images generated by OpenAI, Microsoft, MidJourney, Adobe, Google, and Shutterstock.

“We’re building this capability now, and in the coming months we’ll start this approach through the next year, during which a number of important elections are taking place around the world,” Nick Clegg, Meta president of global affairs said.

Meta recently re-aligned their policy on digitally doctored videos and images, with their oversight board saying it needed to update its terms and conditions to combat the rise of misinformation and disinformation, heightened by the advancements in AI technology.

The effort to label AI-generated images also comes after the Word Economic Forum (WEF) announced disinformation and misinformation as the most severe short term global threats, largely driven by advancements in AI.

However, Meta’s technology is still in development, and they admitted that they are not yet capable of identifying AI tools that generate audio or video at scale.

The company says that they will provide a feature for users uploading organic content that has been digitally modified or altered, “and we may apply penalties if they fail to do so.”

In an interview with Reuters, Clegg admitted that the technology to flag AI-generated audio and video was “not yet fully mature.”

Further, he admitted that there were no tools that could label AI-generated text written by advanced LLMs like ChatGPT – “that ship has sailed,” he told Reuters.

Recommended reading

• AI-driven Misinformation Tops WEF Short-term Threat List
• EU Calls Out Meta & TikTok Amid Flurry of Disinformation Claims
• EU Investigating X Over Alleged Disinformation Amid Israel-Hamas Conflict

As major global elections near, and massive humanitarian crises are pushed and pulled across the world stage, disinformation and misinformation reporting is increasingly vital.

While Meta’s move to label more AI-generated images is positive, the infancy of labelling technology for text, audio, video, and images is troubling in a digital sphere already gripped by AI and its potential for misinformation.

If the ship has sailed for AI-generated text, then what new world are we left to discover, and are consumers being left behind  on the shore, powerless to stop AI’s rapid emergence from turning into an unstoppable rampage?