A Microsoft engineer is sounding alarms about offensive and dangerous imagery he says is simply too simply made by the corporate’s artificial intelligence image-generator tool, sending letters on Wednesday to U.S. regulators and the tech large’s board of administrators urging them to take motion.
Shane Jones instructed The Related Press that he considers himself a whistleblower and that he additionally met final month with U.S. Senate staffers to share his issues.
The Federal Commerce Fee confirmed it acquired his letter Wednesday however declined additional remark.
Microsoft mentioned it’s dedicated to addressing worker issues about firm insurance policies and that it appreciates Jones’ “effort in studying and testing our latest technology to further enhance its safety.” It mentioned it had really useful he use the corporate’s personal “robust internal reporting channels” to research and deal with the issues. CNBC was first to report concerning the letters.
Jones, a principal software program engineering lead, mentioned he has spent three months making an attempt to deal with his security issues about Microsoft’s Copilot Designer, a instrument that may generate novel photos from written prompts. The instrument is derived from one other AI image-generator, DALL-E 3, made by Microsoft’s shut enterprise accomplice OpenAI.
“One of the most concerning risks with Copilot Designer is when the product generates images that add harmful content despite a benign request from the user,” he mentioned in his letter addressed to FTC Chair Lina Khan. “For example, when using just the prompt, ‘car accident’, Copilot Designer has a tendency to randomly include an inappropriate, sexually objectified image of a woman in some of the pictures it creates.”
Different dangerous content material includes violence in addition to “political bias, underaged drinking and drug use, misuse of corporate trademarks and copyrights, conspiracy theories, and religion to name a few,” he instructed the FTC. His letter to Microsoft urges the corporate to take it off the market till it’s safer.
This isn’t the primary time Jones has publicly aired his issues. He mentioned Microsoft at first suggested him to take his findings on to OpenAI, so he did.
He additionally publicly posted a letter to OpenAI on Microsoft-owned LinkedIn in December, main a supervisor to tell him that Microsoft’s authorized group “demanded that I delete the post, which I reluctantly did,” in response to his letter to the board.
Along with the U.S. Senate’s Commerce Committee, Jones has introduced his issues to the state legal professional basic in Washington, the place Microsoft is headquartered.
Jones instructed the AP that whereas the “core issue” is with OpenAI’s DALL-E mannequin, those that use OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate AI photos received’t get the identical dangerous outputs as a result of the 2 corporations overlay their merchandise with totally different safeguards.
“Many of the issues with Copilot Designer are already addressed with ChatGPT’s own safeguards,” he mentioned through textual content.
Quite a lot of spectacular AI image-generators first got here on the scene in 2022, together with the second era of OpenAI’s DALL-E 2. That — and the next launch of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT — sparked public fascination that put business strain on tech giants similar to Microsoft and Google to launch their very own variations.
However with out efficient safeguards, the expertise poses risks, together with the convenience with which customers can generate harmful “deepfake” images of political figures, warfare zones or nonconsensual nudity that falsely seem to point out actual folks with recognizable faces. Google has quickly suspended its Gemini chatbot’s skill to generate photos of individuals following outrage over the way it was depicting race and ethnicity, similar to by placing folks of coloration in Nazi-era army uniforms.
