AI-generated content, misleading ads and fighting bad actors

Dear friends, these months kept us busy, many things happening, many projects we launched. I want to make sure I am giving you a bit of insight on the background, as I am able to capture a deeper breath of new projects, new policies, new features.

?? We've heard reports from some people about misleading ads so we wanted to share some more information about how we tackle this kind of abuse on our platform. Addressing it is a critical priority and we are working to resolve it as quickly as possible.?

We encourage you to continue to flag any content you believe might not be in accordance with our ads policies!?

As our enforcement continues to evolve, we continue to see bad actors operate with more sophistication and at a greater scale, using a variety of tactics to evade our detection.

Here are some of the ways we help people navigate content that is AI-generated:

• Ads disclosures: We’ve expanded our political content policies to require advertisers to disclose when their election ads include synthetic content that in-authentically depicts real or realistic-looking people or events. Our ads policies already prohibit the use of manipulated media to mislead people, like deep fakes or doctored content.
• Ads policy update: We have just announced that as of March, we’ll update our misrepresentation policy to include enticing users to part with money or information by impersonating or falsely implying affiliation with or endorsement by a public figure, brand, or organization. If we find violations of this policy, we will suspend the Google Ads accounts upon detection and without prior warning, and the advertiser will not be allowed to advertise with us again.
• Content labels on YouTube: YouTube’s misinformation policies prohibit technically manipulated content that misleads users and could pose a serious risk of egregious harm — and over the coming months, YouTube will require creators to disclose when they’ve created realistic altered or synthetic content, and will display a label that indicates for people when the content they’re watching is synthetic.
• A responsible approach to Generative AI products: In line with our principled and responsible approach to our Generative AI products like Gemini, we’ve prioritized testing across safety risks ranging from cyber security vulnerabilities to misinformation and fairness.?
• Providing users with additional context:About this image in Search helps people assess the credibility and context of images found online.Our double-check feature in Gemini, which enables people to evaluate whether there’s content across the web to substantiate Gemini’s response, is now rolling out in countries across the EU.
• Digital watermarking and more transparency:SynthID, a tool from Google DeepMind, directly embeds a digital watermark into AI-generated images and audio.We recently joined the C2PA coalition and standard, a cross-industry effort to help provide more transparency and context for people on AI-generated content.

?? Also, we have thousands of people working to improve our enforcement technology and develop new policies to address these threats as they emerge.?

??We work hard to ensure that our combination of comprehensive policies, dedicated teams and innovative technology are constantly reviewed and quickly updated to stop bad ads and malicious actors, and that we are able to quickly respond to new trends when they appear.

We have strict policies that govern the kinds of ads that we allow to run on our platform and we continue to invest in policies and technologies to stop bad actors and keep our users safe.

??2022 numbers here https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/2022_google_ads_safety_report.pdf

and in the next few months we will publish the 2023 numbers.

??? To provide a sense of the scale of our enforcement efforts in 2022, we removed over 5.2 billion ads and suspended over 6.7 million advertiser accounts.??

• In our ads safety report, we segment this figure. For example, In 2022, we blocked or removed 142 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy.?

Between 2020 and 2022, we tripled the number of account-level suspensions for advertisers.

If this is just the beginning of the year, let’s stay close to steer together the rest of 2024 in the most responsible way!