GOOGLE has announced plans to restrict the types of election-related questions the company’s Gemini chatbot will answer for users in the United States and India.
The tech company disclosed this in a blog post recently.
The restrictions are part of a number of steps the company has taken to safeguard its services from misinformation as millions of Indian citizens are set to vote in a general election this Spring.
Read: Google to partner news publishers, fact-checkers to tackle election misinformation in India
“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,” the tech firm wrote in the blog post. “We take our responsibility for providing high-quality information for these types of queries seriously, and are continuously working to improve our protections.”
The platform also rolled out other measures such as enabling people to easily discover critical voting information on Google Search and enhancing the visibility of information from authoritative sources to connect users to helpful information about election.
Google also reiterated its commitment to enforce its policies on the abuse of AI and to work with fact-checkers to counter election misinformation.
It also stressed prohibition of the use of manipulated media such as deepfakes or doctored content to mislead people.
“We want to help provide viewers as much context as possible about the content they’re watching. We’ve already started displaying labels for content created with YouTube generative AI features, like Dream Screen. And soon, YouTube will begin to require creators to disclose when they’ve created realistic altered or synthetic content, and will display a label that indicates for people when they’re watching this content,” Google said.
Google also emphasized its commitment to ensure that every image generated through her products are embedded with watermarking with Google DeepMind’s SynthID.
“We recently joined the C2PA coalition and standard, a cross-industry effort to help provide more transparency and context for people on AI-generated content. Alongside other leading tech companies, we pledged to help prevent deceptive AI-generated imagery, audio or video content from interfering with this year’s global elections.
“The ‘Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections’ is a set of commitments to deploy technology countering harmful AI-generated content meant to deceive voters,” it added.
Nurudeen Akewushola is a fact-checker with FactCheckHub. He has authored several fact checks which have contributed to the fight against information disorder. You can reach him via [email protected] and @NurudeenAkewus1 via Twitter.
