Google has announced restrictions on election-related queries for its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ahead of the general elections in India.
The development arrives as leading tech companies step up measures to ensure election integrity in a number of countries. The year 2024 will witness over 60 states going to the polls, with Pakistan already having held its general election on February 8, 2024.
Besides social media owners such as Facebook and Instagram’s Meta, and TikTok’s ByteDance, leading AI firms, including ChatGPT owner OpenAI, announced initiatives to prevent their services from being weaponised to undermine election integrity.
Google has implemented the changes related to the types of election queries on its AI chatbot Gemini in India and the United States, according to a blog post published Monday.
“Out of an abundance of caution on such an important topic, we have begun to roll out restrictions on the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses,” said Google.
The company added that it takes its responsibility to provide “high-quality” AI-generated responses related to elections “seriously”. It is working on improving its protections, the statement added.
Google’s approach to combat misinformation across its platforms during the Indian elections constitute collaborations with fact-checking initiatives and disclosures of election adverts containing synthetic content. “Our ads policies already prohibit the use of manipulated media to mislead people, like deepfakes or doctored content,” Google said.
The company will also require content creators to disclose when they have created “realistic altered or synthetic content”, for which Google has started displaying labels on YouTube to provide complete context for the content being viewed during the elections. Google will embed watermarks in material generated by its AI image creator, SynthID.
“This all builds on work we do around elections in other countries and regions,” said Google. “Google is committed to working with government, industry, and civil society and surface and connect voters to authoritative and helpful information online.”
