Meta bars political advertisers from using its AI ads tools

The news: Facebook owner Meta will bar political advertisers from using its generative AI advertising tools amid fears they could fuel the spread of election misinformation, Reuters reports.

The numbers: Last month, Meta began releasing AI-assisted tools that can create content including backgrounds, ad copy and make image adjustments. The company has extended the tools to a small group of advertisers, but plans to roll them out globally in 2024.

The context: Meta is the second biggest platform for digital ads, second only to Alphabet's Google, which released similar image-customising ads tools last week. Google plans to block the use of political keywords as prompts for its AI tools, Reuters reported. The policies represent some of the first steps in self-regulation taken on AI by the tech industry.