Jul 27, 2023
·[[read-time]] min read
Here’s what we have observed in the last six months via AI principles reviews and the use of responsible AI technical tools and approaches.
Google’s ongoing work in AI powers tools that billions of people use every day — including Google Search, Translate, Maps and more. Some of the work we’re most excited about involves using AI to solve major societal issues — from forecasting floods and cutting carbon to improving healthcare. We’ve learned that AI has the potential to have a far-reaching impact on the global crises facing everyone, while at the same expanding the benefits of existing innovations to people around the world.
This is why AI must be developed responsibly, in ways that address identifiable concerns like fairness, privacy and safety, with collaboration across the AI ecosystem. And it’s why — in the wake of announcing that we were an “AI-first” company in 2017 — we shared our AI Principles and have since built an extensive AI Principles governance structure and a scalable and repeatable ethics review process. To help others develop AI responsibly, we’ve also developed a growing Responsible AI toolkit.
Each year, we share a detailed report on our processes for risk assessments, ethics reviews and technical improvements in a publicly available annual update — 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 — supplemented by a brief, midyear look at our own progress that covers what we’re seeing across the industry.
This year, generative AI is receiving more public focus, conversation and collaborative interest than any emerging technology in our lifetime. That’s a good thing. This collaborative spirit can only benefit the goal of AI’s responsible development on the road to unlocking its benefits, from helping small businesses create more compelling ad campaigns to enabling more people to prototype new AI applications, even without writing any code.
For our part, we’ve applied the AI Principles and an ethics review process to our own development of AI in our products — generative AI is no exception. What we’ve found in the past six months is that there are clear ways to promote safer, socially beneficial practices to generative AI concerns like unfair bias and factuality. We proactively integrate ethical considerations early in the design and development process and have significantly expanded our reviews of early-stage AI efforts, with a focus on guidance around generative AI projects.
For our midyear update, we’d like to share three of our best practices based on this guidance and what we’ve done in our pre-launch design, reviews and development of generative AI: design for responsibility, conduct adversarial testing and communicate simple, helpful explanations.
1. Design for responsibility.It’s important to first identify and document potential harms and start the generative AI product development process with the use of responsible datasets, classifiers and filters to address those harms proactively. From that basis, we also:
Developers can stress-test generative AI models internally to identify and mitigate potential risks before launch and any ongoing releases. For example, with Bard, our experiment that lets people collaborate with generative AI, we tested for outputs that could be interpreted as person-like, which can lead to potentially harmful misunderstandings, and then created a safeguard by restricting Bard’s use of “I” statements to limit risk of inappropriate anthropomorphization we discovered during testing. We also:
At launch, we seek to offer clear communication on when and how generative AI is used. We strive to show how people can offer feedback, and how they’re in control. For example, for Bard, some of our explainability practices included:
We also strive to be clear with users when they are engaging with a new generative AI technology in the experimental phase. For example, Labs releases such as NotebookLM are labeled prominently with “Experiment,” along with specific details on what limited features are available during the early access period.
Another explainability practice is thorough documentation on how the generative AI service or product works. For Bard, this included a comprehensive overview offering clarity on the cap on the number of interactions to ensure quality, accuracy and prevent potential personification and other details on safety, and a privacy notice to help users understand how Bard handles their data.
Maintaining transparency is also key. We released a detailed technical report on PaLM 2, the model currently powering Bard, which includes information based on our internal documentation of evaluation details, and guidance for AI researchers and developers on the responsible use of the model.
In addition to the three observations above, we’re broadly focused on ensuring that new generative AI technologies have equally innovative guardrails when addressing concerns such as image provenance. Our efforts include watermarking images Google AI tools generate (as in Virtual Try On or Da Vinci Stickies) and offering image markups for publishers to indicate when an image is AI generated.
Being bold and being responsible are not at odds with each other — in fact, they go together in promoting the acceptance, adoption and helpfulness of new technologies. Earlier this month, we kicked off a public discussion inviting web publishers, civil society, academia and AI communities to offer thoughts on approaches to protocols to support the future development of the Internet in the age of generative AI. As we move ahead, we will continue to share how we apply emerging practices for responsible generative AI development and ongoing transparency with our annual, year-end AI Principles Progress Update.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.3