Meta explains why Meta AI made incorrect claims about Trump rally shooting

Meta

Meta’s AI assistant was recently called out for not giving any details about the recent attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. In a post on social media platform Truth Social, Trump accused Meta of “rigging” the election. Meta has now clarified what really happened.

In a blog post, Joel Kaplan, VP Global Policy, Meta said that while there was no bias, “it was unfortunate and we understand why it could leave people with that impression.”

Kaplan said that all AI chatbots, including Meta AI, are not always reliable when it comes to breaking news or returning information in real time. In the case of breaking news events — like the attempted assassination — Kaplan said that there is initially an “enormous amount of confusion, conflicting information, or outright conspiracy theories in the public domain (including many obviously incorrect claims that the assassination attempt didn’t happen).”

Why Meta 'denied' Trump assassination attempt

Meta, as per Kaplan, didn’t want Meta AI to give incorrect information about the attempted assassination. So, it programmed it to simply not answer questions about it after it happened – and instead give a generic response about how it couldn’t provide any information. “This is why some people reported our AI was refusing to talk about the event,” explained Kaplan.

He also said that the Meta AI responses about assassination attempt on Trump have been updated. He also said that there still might be a small number of cases, where Meta AI could provide incorrect answers. “These types of responses are referred to as hallucinations, which is an industry-wide issue we see across all generative AI systems, and is an ongoing challenge for how AI handles real-time events going forward,” he said, before adding that Meta will continue to address these issues and improve these features as they evolve and more people share their feedback.

Kaplan also clarified about a a doctored photo of former President Trump with his fist in the air, which made it look like the Secret Service agents were smiling. Since the photo was altered, a fact check label was initially and correctly applied. “When a fact check label is applied, our technology detects content that is the same or almost exactly the same as those rated by fact checkers, and adds a label to that content as well,” Kaplan explained. Meta’s systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo as well but the mistake has now been corrected.