May 9 (Reuters) - TikTok plans to start labelling images

and video uploaded to its video-sharing service that have been

generated using artificial intelligence, it said on Thursday,

using a digital watermark known as Content Credentials.

Researchers have expressed concern that AI-generated content

could be used to interfere with U.S. elections this fall, and

TikTok was already among a group of 20 tech companies that

earlier this year signed an accord pledging to fight it.

The company already labels AI-generated content made with

tools inside the app, but the latest move would apply a label to

videos and images generated outside of the service.

"We also have policies that prohibit realistic AI that is

not labeled, so if realistic AI (generated contents) appears on

the platform, then we will remove it as violating our community

guidelines," Adam Presser, head of operations and trust and

safety at TikTok, said in an interview.

The Content Credentials technology was spearheaded by the

Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, a group

co-founded by Adobe, Microsoft ( MSFT ) and others, but

is open for other companies to use.

It has already been adopted by the likes of ChatGPT creator

OpenAI.

YouTube, owned by Alphabet's Google, and Meta

Platforms ( META ), which owns Instagram and Facebook, have also

said they plan to use Content Credentials.

For the system to work, both the maker of the generative AI

tool used to make content and the platform used to distribute

the contents must both agree to use the industry standard.

When a person uses OpenAI's Dall-E tool to generate an

image, for example, OpenAI attaches a watermark to the resulting

image and adds data to the file that can later indicate whether

it has been tampered with.

If that marked image is then uploaded to TikTok, it will be

automatically labeled as AI-generated.

TikTok, which is owned by China's ByteDance, has 170 million

users in the U.S., which recently passed a law requiring

ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban. TikTok and ByteDance

have sued to block the law, arguing it violates the First

Amendment.