In the case of the Google Gemini images, filters made to reduce bias had unintended effects, which is an area where Microsoft says its Azure AI tools will allow for more customized control. Bird acknowledges that there is concern Microsoft and other companies could be deciding what is or isn’t appropriate for AI models, so her team added a way for Azure customers to toggle the filtering of hate speech or violence that the model sees and blocks.
In the future, Azure users can also get a report of users who attempt to trigger unsafe outputs. Bird says this allows system administrators to figure out which users are its own team of red teamers and which could be people with more malicious intent.
Bird says the safety features are immediately “attached” to GPT-4 and other popular models like Llama 2. However, because Azure’s model garden contains many AI models, users of smaller, less used open-source systems may have to manually point the safety features to the models.
Microsoft has been turning to AI to beef up the safety and security of its software, especially as more customers become interested in using Azure to access AI models. The company has also worked to expand the number of powerful AI models it provides, most recently inking an exclusive deal with French AI company Mistral to offer the Mistral Large model on Azure.