Twenty internet companies had joined together to stop misleading AI content from meddling in elections this year all across the world.

More than half of the world's population is scheduled to cast ballots in major elections this year, and the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which can produce text, images, and video in seconds in response to prompts, has raised concerns that the new technology could be used to influence those results.

Signatories to the tech deal, which was unveiled at the Munich Security Conference, include Microsoft, Adobe, and OpenAI, among other businesses that are developing generative AI models for content creation. Other signatories include Meta Platforms, TikTok, and X, the old name of Twitter, among other social media companies that will have difficulty removing dangerous content from their websites.

As part of the agreement, parties pledge to work together to develop technologies that will identify fraudulent AI-generated images, audio, and video; to create public awareness campaigns to inform voters about this type of content; and to take action against such content on their services.

Watermarking or embedding information could be technologies used to identify content generated by AI or verify its origin, according to the firms.

The agreement did not outline a schedule for fulfilling the obligations or the manner in which each company was to carry them out.

"I think the utility of this (accord) is the breadth of the companies signing up to it," said Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta Platforms.

"It's all good and well if individual platforms develop new policies of detection, provenance, labeling, watermarking and so on, but unless there is a wider commitment to do so in a shared interoperable way, we're going to be stuck with a hodgepodge of different commitments," Clegg says.