The Download: Nick Clegg on electoral misinformation, and AI's carbon footprint

Meta has seen strikingly little AI-generated misinformation around the 2024 elections despite major votes in countries such as Indonesia, Taiwan, and Bangladesh, said the company's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, on Wednesday. "The interesting thing so far--I stress, so far--is not how much but how little AI-generated content [there is]," said Clegg during an interview at MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As voters will head to polls this year in more than 50 countries, experts have raised the alarm over AI-generated political disinformation and the prospect that malicious actors will use generative AI and social media to interfere with elections. And even well-resourced tech giants like Meta are struggling to keep up. How generative AI is boosting the spread of disinformation and propaganda.