He emphasised that AI is the key factor enabling Meta to improve its handling of ‘bad content’ across its platforms
Sir Nick Clegg has hailed artificial intelligence (AI) as a “sword and a shield” in the fight against harmful content, asserting that it’s not just a tool for spreading misinformation.
The ex-Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister, who now spearheads global affairs at Meta, the conglomerate behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, made his remarks at an AI event in Meta’s London hub. During his speech, Sir Nick acknowledged the importance of being “vigilant” about generative AI’s potential to churn out disinformation aimed at election meddling.
However, he emphasised that AI is the key factor enabling Meta to improve its handling of “bad content” across its platforms. With 2024, billions are poised to cast their votes in elections across some of the world’s most influential democracies, including the UK, US, and India.
This upcoming wave of democratic activity has prompted concerns among experts over the burgeoning threat of generative AI tools capable of creating deceptive images, texts, and audio and their potential use in undermining electoral integrity. The issue has already hit close to home, with several high-profile UK politicians becoming targets of viral deepfake videos.
In light of these developments, Full Fact, a fact-checking charity, warned on Tuesday that the UK is currently at risk from misinformation. With critical elections looming, the charity called for increased government action to tackle the problem.
Sir Nick emphasised the importance of focusing on AI, suggesting that robust AI systems are key to combating harmful content. “I would urge everyone yes, there are risks but to also think of AI as a sword, not just a shield, when it comes to bad content,” he stated.
He highlighted Meta’s success in reducing undesirable material on its platforms, attributing the improvement to AI: “If you look at Meta, the world’s largest social media platform, the single biggest reason why we’re getting better and better in reducing the bad content that we don’t want on Instagram and Facebook is for one reason; AI.”
Sir Nick pointed out that AI-driven scanning has slashed the presence of harmful content by “50 to 60% over the last two years” resulting in only “for every 10,000 bits of content, one bit of content might be hate speech”.
He also said the internal efforts at Meta to refine the use of advanced AI tools for content triage, ensuring that the 40,000 content moderators focus on the most critical cases.
He added: “Some of the work teams have been doing inside Meta to improve the way that we use our most advanced AI tools to triage content, so that we make sure that the 40,000 people we have working on content moderation really look at the most acute edge cases and they don’t waste a lot of their time looking at stuff that is inoffensive or not a problem has really improved rapidly in recent months,” he explained.
Lastly, he acknowledged the growing cooperation within the industry, especially in light of the numerous elections this year: “It is right that there is an increasingly high level of industry wide cooperation, particularly this year because of this unprecedented number of elections.”
“We should be vigilant, but I would urge you to also think of AI as a great tool to navigate that difficult landscape and I’m quietly optimistic that the whole industry is trying to really lean into this as cooperatively as possible.”
During the event, Sir Nick also revealed that Meta’s next AI large language model used to power AI tools like chatbots developed by Meta and other firms would be launching soon. Sir Nick announced that the new model, dubbed Llama 3, would start to roll out “within the next month, hopefully less” and would continue over the course of the year.
