Meta plans to identify more AI-generated images ahead of upcoming elections
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives at federal court in San Jose, California, on Dec. 20, 2022.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta is expanding its effort to identify images doctored by artificial intelligence as it seeks to weed out misinformation and deepfakes ahead of upcoming elections around the world.
The company is building tools to identify AI-generated content at scale when it appears on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, it announced Tuesday.
Until now, Meta only labeled AI-generated images developed using its own AI tools. Now, the company says it will seek to apply those labels on content from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney and Shutterstock.
The labels will appear in all the languages available on each app. But the shift won’t be immediate.
In the blog post, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, wrote that the company will begin to label AI-generated images originating from external sources “in the coming months” and continue working on the problem “through the next year.”
The added time is needed to work with other AI companies to “align on common technical standards that signal when a piece of content has been created using AI,” Clegg wrote.
Election-related misinformation caused a crisis for Facebook after the 2016 presidential election because of the way foreign actors, largely from Russia, were able to create and spread highly charged and inaccurate content. The platform was repeatedly exploited in the ensuing years, most notably during the Covid pandemic, when people used the platform to spread vast amounts of misinformation. Holocaust deniers and QAnon conspiracy theorists also ran rampant on the site.
Meta is trying to show that it’s prepared for bad actors to use more advanced forms of technology in the 2024 cycle.
While some AI-generated content is easily detected, that’s not always the case. Services that claim to identify AI-generated text, such as essays, have been shown to exhibit bias against non-native English speakers. It’s not much easier for images and videos, though there are often signs.
Meta is looking to minimize uncertainty by working mainly with other AI companies that use invisible watermarks and certain types of metadata in the images created on their platforms. However, there are ways to remove watermarks, a problem that Meta plans to address.
“We’re working hard to develop classifiers that can help us to automatically detect AI-generated content, even if the content lacks invisible markers,” Clegg wrote. “At the same time, we’re looking for ways to make it more difficult to remove or alter invisible watermarks.”
Audio and video can be even harder to monitor than images, because there’s not yet an industry standard for AI companies to add any invisible identifiers.
“We can’t yet detect those signals and label this content from other companies,” Clegg wrote.
Meta will add a way for users to voluntarily disclose when they upload AI-generated video or audio. If they share a deepfake or other form of AI-generated content without disclosing it, the company “may apply penalties,” the post says.
“If we determine that digitally created or altered image, video or audio content creates a particularly high risk of materially deceiving the public on a matter of importance, we may add a more prominent label if appropriate,” Clegg wrote.
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike