Meta's Nick Clegg plays down AI's threat to global democracy

Generative AI is overblown as an election risk, according to Meta's Nick Clegg, who claims the technology is more useful for defending democracy than attacking it. Speaking at the Meta AI Day event in London on Tuesday, the social network's global affairs chief said that the evidence from major elections that have already been run this year around the world is that technology such as large language models, image and video generators, and speech synthesis tools aren't being used in practice to subvert democracy. "It is right that we should be alert and we should be vigilant," Clegg said. "But of the major elections which have taken place already this year, in Taiwan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia, it is striking how little these tools have been used in a systematic basis to really try to subvert and disrupt the elections. "I would urge everyone to think of AI as a sword, not just a shield, when it comes to bad content.