OpenAI Officials Meet Poll Body, Discuss Ways To Combat AI During Elections

Amid a busy year of high-stakes elections around the world, officials from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI met the members of the Election Commission of India.

During the meeting, which was held last month, the OpenAI officials showed a presentation to the members of the poll body about the steps that they are taking to ensure that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not misused in the upcoming general polls in the country.

The meeting comes as big tech companies are under considerable pressure over fears that AI tools could be misused in a pivotal election year. Over 25 countries, including India, the US, and the UK, are going to the polls this year.

Tech giants, including OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and Google last month joined together in a pledge to fight AI content designed to mislead voters.

They promised to use technologies to counter potentially harmful AI content, such as through the use of watermarks invisible to the human eye but detectable by machine.

The companies said they would also work together to develop ways to "detect and address" deceptive election material on their platforms. Such content could, for example, be annotated to make it clear it is AI-generated.

Among the 20 signatories of the deal, presented on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany, were also X, formerly known as Twitter, Tiktok, Snap, Adobe, LinkedIn, Amazon and IBM.

AI-driven disinformation and misinformation are the biggest short-term global risks and could undermine newly elected governments in major economies, the World Economic Forum had warned in a report released earlier this year.