OpenAI officials meet with pollsters to discuss ways to combat AI during elections

New Delhi:

Officials from ChatGPT maker OpenAI met with members of the Election Commission of India amid a busy year for high-stakes elections around the world.

At a meeting last month, OpenAI officials presented to pollster members the steps they are taking to ensure artificial intelligence (AI) is not misused in the country’s upcoming general election.

The meeting comes as big tech companies are under intense pressure over concerns that artificial intelligence tools could be misused in a crucial election year. More than 25 countries, including India, the United States and the United Kingdom, will vote this year.

Tech giants including OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft and Google jointly pledged last month to crack down on artificial intelligence content designed to mislead voters.

They pledge to use technology to combat potentially harmful AI content, such as through the use of watermarks invisible to the human eye but detectable by machines.

The companies said they would also work together to develop ways to “detect and deal with” deceptive election materials on their platforms. For example, such content could be annotated to make it clear that it was generated by artificial intelligence.

X (formerly Twitter, Tiktok, Snap, Adobe, LinkedIn, Amazon and IBM) is also among the 20 signatories to the agreement announced on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany.

The World Economic Forum warned in a report released earlier this year that AI-driven disinformation and misinformation was the biggest short-term global risk that could harm newly elected governments in major economies.