Meta AI begins to restrict answers to questions on elections in India

Just as the world's largest democracy prepares for general elections, Facebook parent company Meta is limiting answers to election-related queries on its chatbot Meta AI in India. The business is preventing users from asking the AI chatbot questions about political candidates and election-related information. Although Meta has not yet formally launched Meta AI in India, the firm is now testing the AI chatbot with a small number of Indian customers across all of its apps, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.

The chatbot provides a boilerplate response to these queries which says that the question "may pertain to a political figure during general elections" and asks users to head over to the website of the Election Commission of India.

"This is a new technology, and it may not always return the response we intend, which is the same for all generative AI systems. Since we launched, we've constantly released updates and improvements to our models, and we're continuing to work on making them better," a company spokesperson said.

The chatbot was made available across the company's suite of apps such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger in more than a dozen countries including the United States, Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

India, which is Meta's largest market in terms of user base with a combined user base of over a billion users, was however notably missing from the first wave of countries.

The development is part of a larger effort by tech giants to put in place policies and safeguards to fight the misuse of its tools and the spread of misinformation on its platforms.

Meta recently announced it is building tools to label AI-generated images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney, and Shutterstock that users post to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. It also stated plans to activate a country-specific Elections Operations Center in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections. This centre will bring together experts from the company's intelligence, data science, engineering, research, operations, content policy, and legal teams to "identify potential threats and put specific mitigations in place across its apps and technologies in real time"