Last week, Meta began testing its AI chatbot in India on WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. But as India’s general elections begin today, the company is already blocking specific queries in its chatbot.
Meta has confirmed that it is restricting certain election-related keywords for AI in the testing phase. He also said that he is working on improving the AI response system.
“This is a new technology, and it will not always give the desired answer, which is the same for all generative AI systems. Since our launch, we have constantly released updates and improvements to our models, and we continue to work to improve them,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The move makes the social media giant the last big tech company, proactively reducing the scope of its generative AI services as it prepares for a series of major elections.
One of the main concerns of critics is that genAI could provide misleading or outright false information to users, thereby playing an illegal and unwanted role in the democratic process.
Last month, Google began blocking election-related queries in its Gemini chatbot experiment in India and other markets where elections will be held this year.
Meta’s approach follows a larger effort the company announced regarding what it does and does not allow on its platform leading up to the election. It has committed to blocking political ads in the week leading up to an election in any country, and it works to identify and disclose when images in ads or other content have been created with AI.
Meta’s handling of genAI requests appears to be blocklist-based. When you query Meta AI about politicians, candidates, office holders and some other specific terms, it will redirect you to the Electoral Commission website.
“This question may concern a political figure during the legislative elections. Please refer the link https://elections24.eci.gov.in,” the response said.
Image credits: Screenshot by TechCrunch
Notably, the company does not strictly block responses to questions containing party names. However, if a query includes candidate names or other terms, you might see the boilerplate response cited above.
But just like other AI-based systems, Meta AI has some inconsistencies. For example, when TechCrunch asked for information about “Indi Alliance” – a multi-party political alliance fighting against the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – it responded with information containing the name of a politician. However, when we asked about this politician in a separate query, the chatbot did not respond with any information.
Image credits: Screenshot by TechCrunch
This week, the company rolled out a new Meta AI chatbot powered by Llama-3 in more than a dozen countries, including the United States, but India was absent from the list. Meta said the chatbot would be in the testing phase in the country for now.
“We continue to learn from our user testing in India. As we do with many of our AI products and features, we are publicly testing them in various phases and in a limited capacity,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement.
Meta AI currently does not block election queries for US-related terms such as “Tell me about Joe Biden”. We asked Meta if the company would consider limiting these queries to US elections or other markets. We will update the story if we receive a response.
If you would like to talk about your experience with Meta AI, you can contact Ivan Mehta at im@ivanmehta.com via email and via this link on Signal.
techcrunch
