Introduction: Generative AI is widely considered the fastest moving technology innovation in history. It has captured the imagination of consumers and enterprises across the globe, spawning incredible innovation and along with it a mutating market ecosystem. Generative AI has also caused a copious amount of FOMO, missteps, and false starts. These are the classic signals of technology disruption – lots of innovation, but also lots of mistakes. It is a rumpus room with a lot of “kids” going wild. The rumpus room needs adults. Guidance through the generative AI minefield will come from thoughtful organizations who do not panic, who understand the fundamentals of AI, and who manage risk.
My picks for this week’s Adults In The Generative AI Rumpus Room are AI Standards Hub, Google, and The Prompt Engineer Collective.
AI Standards Hub Launches Cross-Group Collaboration
The News: On December 18, I received my first AI Standards Hub newsletter. Established in October 2022, the UK-based organization is federating, promoting collaboration on AI standards globally across multiple standards groups.
To note: “A rapidly growing range of AI-related work is underway across an increasing number of Standards Development Organisations (SDOs) around the world. Against this background, the AI Standards Hub aims to help stakeholders navigate and actively participate in international AI standardisation efforts and to inform the direction of these efforts.”
In pursuing its mission, the AI Standards Hub will: “adopt a global perspective and engage with relevant initiatives around the world to promote coordination and coherence at the international level, emphasize stakeholder inclusiveness and give special consideration to stakeholder segments that are traditionally underrepresented in standards development processes (including civil society organisations and SMEs), promote interdisciplinarity to ensure that AI standardisation efforts benefit from all relevant forms of technical and non-technical expertise and incorporate considerations of ethics to realise socially beneficial innovation.”
You can read AI Standards Hub’s mission statement and blog posts here.
Adults because… Standards, more than government regulations, have a significant calming effect on nearly anything they are applied to. Normalizing and codifying AI standards across standards bodies will help those groups find the common ground issues and to some extent, address those issues.
Google to Restrict Generative AI Tools, Help Users Identify AI Generated Content for 2024 Elections
The News: On December 19, Google announced in a blog post that the company will restrict the types of election-related queries for which Bard and Search Generative Experience (SGE) will return responses starting early in 2024. SGE is a way for Google customers to access and try Google’s early experiments in generative AI-powered search. In addition, Google introduced several new tools and policies to help people identify content that may seem realistic but is actually AI-generated:
- Ads disclosures: Google says it is the first tech company to require election advertisers to prominently disclose when their ads include realistic synthetic content that has been digitally altered or generated, including by AI tools.
- Content labels: Over the coming months, YouTube will require creators to disclose when they have created realistic altered or synthetic content and will display a label that indicates for people when the content they are watching is synthetic.
- Additional context:
- About this Result provides context in SGE, and Google’s double-check feature in Bard enables people to evaluate whether there is content across the web to substantiate Bard’s English language response.
- About this image in Search helps people assess the credibility and context of images found online.
- Digital watermarking: SynthID, a tool in beta from Google DeepMind, directly embeds a digital watermark into AI-generated images and audio.
Read Google’s blog post on Election safeguards here.
Adults because… It is still early days in the use of generative AI and the challenges large language models (LLMs) pose in the results they produce—especially bias, misinformation, and disinformation—are still significant. Deepfake images and videos are an issue for generative AI diffusion models as well. Restricting the use of Google’s generative AI-output tools will prevent the use of Google products to influence 2024 elections. Let us hope other providers follow suit.
Prompt Engineer Collective Champions Generative AI Expertise
The News: In late December, “Everett K” published a LinkedIn post pointing to a research paper that shows how researchers, using prompt engineering, were able to extract sensitive personal information from the data used to train GPT-3.5. He goes on: “Prompt Injection has been a leading concern in deploying user facing LLMs, and as of yet, my colleagues at the Prompt Engineer Collective have seen only a few companies successfully protect against our techniques.”
The Prompt Engineer Collective was founded with the following mission: “Empower the AI evolution by uniting developers, enthusiasts, and business innovators within the Prompt Engineer Collective – the premier hub for generative AI expertise. We’re committed to sparking innovation, championing unparalleled collaboration, and nurturing an engaging community eager for critical dialogue and open to exploring the next big idea in AI.” Members get access to a private Slack group, while the general public can access, via the organization’s website, a range of resources. A weekly newsletter highlights significant developments in prompt engineering.
Access the Prompt Engineer Collective website here.
Read the research paper, Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT here.
Adults because… There are many growing communities of AI-focused developers, but there are not any developer groups with a specific focus on growing generative AI developer and prompt engineering best practices. This watchdog group has a pragmatic approach to bettering generative AI outcomes.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Google Named Top Adult in the Generative AI Rumpus Room 2023
Adults in the Generative AI Rumpus Room: Anthropic, AWS, Meta
Adults in the Generative AI Rumpus Room: Leica, Data Provenance, Google
Author Information
Mark comes to The Futurum Group from Omdia’s Artificial Intelligence practice, where his focus was on natural language and AI use cases.
Previously, Mark worked as a consultant and analyst providing custom and syndicated qualitative market analysis with an emphasis on mobile technology and identifying trends and opportunities for companies like Syniverse and ABI Research. He has been cited by international media outlets including CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and CNET. Based in Tampa, Florida, Mark is a veteran market research analyst with 25 years of experience interpreting technology business and holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Florida.
