Facebook parent Meta is restricting responses for election-related queries on its artificial intelligence chatbot Meta AI in India, just as the general elections kick off in the world's largest democracy.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed to Moneycontrol that the company is blocking queries on political candidates and election-related content on the AI chatbot in the country.
While Meta has not officially rolled out Meta AI in India as yet, the company is currently testing the AI chatbot with select users in India across its suite of products, including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, Moneycontrol reported on April 12.
At the time of writing this article, Moneycontrol noticed that 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. TechCrunch was the first to report on this development.
On April 18, Meta unveiled a new version of Meta AI, powered by its latest large language model Llama 3.
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.
"We continue to learn from our user tests in India. As we do with many of our AI products and features, we test them publicly in varying phases and in a limited capacity," a Meta spokesperson said at the time.
This move comes nearly a month after Google also rolled out a similar restriction on the types of election-related queries for which its AI chatbot Gemini will respond.
Gemini does not provide a response to queries related to specific candidates, political parties, election results or notable office holders and will instead direct consumers to use its search engine product, Moneycontrol has learnt.
What Meta is doing for elections in India
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"
The company also announced a partnership with the news agency Press Trust of India to expand its third-party fact-checking programme in the country. With this partnership, Meta said that it now has 12 fact-checking partners in India, making it the country with the most third-party fact-checking partners in the world.
Through its partners, Meta said it now covers 16 Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, Punjabi, Assamese, Manipuri/ Meitei, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Kashmiri, Bhojpuri, Oriya and Nepali, apart from English.
Discover the latest Business News, Sensex, and Nifty updates. Obtain Personal Finance insights, tax queries, and expert opinions on Moneycontrol or download the Moneycontrol App to stay updated!
