Google to partner with other intermediaries to tackle election disinformation: VP for trust and safety, Laurie Richardson

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Google will partner with internet intermediaries in India to tackle misinformation generated before the upcoming general elections next year, especially those created by generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, the company’s vice-president for trust and safety, Laurie Richardson said. Speaking to select Indian media on Thursday, Richardson said that apart from watermarking the content generated by all of its products and sharing the metadata on text and images, there will be some transparency requirements around content that has been generated by such AI tools.

“We will be partnering with the broader ecosystem to drive forward responsible approaches to all of this, because we know that the harm does not start and stop on our own platforms,” she said. The nature of the partnerships with other internet intermediaries and the kind of information that will be shared with them is still a work in progress, Richardson said, adding that these partnerships could be in the form of release of child sexual abuse material detecting application programming interfaces (APIs) that is available to all.

“When we think about how to solve a problem, we tend to make our tools available and accessible to others,” she said. Though the absence of a concrete definition of misinformation makes the task of technology companies such as Google that much more difficult, the company will always address and take down content that is deemed illegal by governments.