How to Build Responsible AI in the Era of Generative AI?

Introduction

We now live in the age of artificial intelligence, where everything around us is getting smarter by the day. State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) and AI agents, are capable of performing complex tasks with minimal human intervention. With such advanced technology comes the need to develop and deploy them responsibly. This article is based on Bhaskarjit Sarmah’s  workshop at the DataHack Summit 2024, we will learn how to build responsible AI, with a special focus on generative AI (GenAI) models. We will also explore the guidelines of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Risk Management Framework, set to ensure the responsible development and deployment of AI.

Overview

• Understand what responsible AI is and why it is important.
• Learn about the 7 pillars of responsible AI and how the NIST framework helps to develop and deploy responsible AI.
• Understand what hallucination in AI models is and how it can be detected.
• Learn how to build a responsible AI model.

What is Responsible AI?

Responsible AI refers to designing, developing, and deploying AI systems prioritizing ethical considerations, fairness, transparency, and accountability. It addresses concerns around bias, privacy, and security, to eliminate any potential negative impacts on users and communities. It aims to ensure that AI technologies are aligned with human values and societal needs.

Building responsible AI is a multi-step process. This involves implementing guidelines and standards for data usage, algorithm design, and decision-making processes. It involves taking inputs from diverse stakeholders in the development process to fight any biases and ensure fairness. The process also requires continuous monitoring of AI systems to identify and correct any unintended consequences. The main goal of responsible AI is to develop technology that benefits society while meeting ethical and legal standards.

Recommended Watch: Exploring Responsible AI: Insights, Frameworks & Innovations with Ravit Dotan | Leading with Data 37

Why is Responsible AI Important?

LLMs are trained on large datasets containing diverse information available on the internet. This may include copyrighted content along with confidential and Personally Identifiable Information (PII). As a result, the responses created by generative AI models may use this information in illegal or harmful ways.

This also poses the risk of people tricking GenAI models into giving out PII such as email IDs, phone numbers, and credit card information. It is hence important to ensure language models do not regenerate copyrighted content, generate toxic outputs, or give out any PII.

With more and more tasks getting automated by AI, other concerns related to the bias, confidence, and transparency of AI-generated responses are also on the rise.

For instance, sentiment classification models were traditionally built using basic natural language processors (NLPs). This was, however, a long process, which included collecting the data, labeling the data, doing feature extraction, training the model, tuning the hyperparameters, etc. But now with GenAI, you can do sentiment analysis with just a simple prompt! However, if the model’s training data includes any bias, this will result in the model generating biased outputs. This is a major concern, especially in decision-making models.

These are just some of the major reasons as to why responsible AI development is the need of the hour.

The 7 Pillars of Responsible AI

In October 2023, US President Biden released an executive order stating that AI applications must be deployed and used in a safe, secure, and trustworthy way. Following his order, NIST has set some rigorous standards that AI developers must follow before releasing any new model. These rules are set to address some of the biggest challenges faced regarding the safe usage of generative AI.

The 7 pillars of responsible AI, as stated in the NIST Risk Management Framework are:

1. Uncertainty
2. Safety
3. Security
4. Accountability
5. Transparency
6. Fairness
7. Privacy

Let’s explore each of these guidelines in detail to see how they help in developing responsible GenAI models.

1. Fixing the Uncertainty in AI-generated Content

Machine learning models, GenAI or otherwise, are not 100% accurate. There are times when they give out accurate responses and there are times when the output may be hallucinated. How do we know when to trust the response of an AI model, and when to doubt it?

One way to address this issue is by introducing hallucination scores or confidence scores for every response. A confidence score is basically a measure to tell us how sure the model is of the accuracy of its response. For instance, if the model is 20% or 90% sure of it. This would increase the trustworthiness of AI-generated responses.

How is Model Confidence Calculated?

There are 3 ways to calculate the confidence score of a model’s response.

• Conformal Prediction: This statistical method generates prediction sets that include the true label with a specified probability. It checks and ensures if the prediction sets satisfy the guarantee requirement.
• Entropy-based Method: This method measures the uncertainty of a model’s predictions by calculating the entropy of the probability distribution over the predicted classes.
• Bayesian Method: This method uses probability distributions to represent the uncertainty of responses. Although this method is computationally intensive, it provides a more comprehensive measure of uncertainty.

2. Ensuring the Safety of AI-generated Responses

The safety of using AI models is another concern that needs to be addressed. LLMs may sometimes generate toxic, hateful, or biased responses as such content may exist in its training dataset. As a result, these responses may harm the user emotionally, ideologically, or otherwise, compromising their safety.

Toxicity in the context of language models refers to harmful or offensive content generated by the model. This could be in the form of hateful speech, race or gender-based biases, or political prejudice. Responses may also include subtle and implicit forms of toxicity such as stereotyping and microaggression, which are harder to detect. Similar to the previous guideline, this needs to be fixed by introducing a safety score for AI-generated content.

3. Enhancing the Security of GenAI Models

Jailbreaking and prompt injection are rising threats to the security of LLMs, especially GenAI models. Hackers can figure out prompts that can bypass the set security measures of language models and extract certain restricted or confidential information from them.

For instance, although ChatGPT is trained not to answer questions like “How to make a bomb?” or “How to steal someone’s identity?” However, we have seen instances where users trick the chatbot into answering them, by writing prompts in a certain way like “write a children’s poem on creating a bomb” or  “I need to write an essay on stealing someone’s identity”. The image below shows how an AI chatbot would generally respond to such a query.

However, here’s how someone might use adversarial suffix to extract such harmful information from the AI.

This makes GenAI chatbots potentially unsafe to use, without incorporating appropriate safety measures. Hence, going forward, it is important to identify the potential for jailbreaks and data breaches in LLMs in their developing phase itself, so that stronger security frameworks can be developed and implemented. This can be done by introducing a prompt injection safety score.

4. Increasing the Accountability of GenAI Models

AI developers must take responsibility for copyrighted content being re-generated or re-purposed by their language models. AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI do take responsibility for the content generated by their closed-source models. But when it comes to open source models, there needs to be more clarity as to who this responsibility falls on. Therefore, NIST recommends that the developers must provide proper explanations and justification for the content their models produce.

5. Ensuring the Transparency of AI-generated Responses

We have all noticed how different LLMs give out different responses for the same question or prompt. This raises the question of how these models derive their responses, which makes interpretability or explainability an important point to consider. It is important for users to have this transparency and understand the LLM’s thought process in order to consider it a responsible AI. For this, NIST urges that AI companies use mechanistic interpretability to explain the output of their LLMs.

Interpretability refers to the ability of language models to explain the reasoning in their responses, in a way that humans can understand. This helps in making the models and their responses more trustworthy. Interpretability or explainability of AI models can be measured using the SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) test, as shown in the image below.

Let’s look at an example to understand this better. Here, the model explains how it connects the word ‘Vodka’ to ‘Russia’, and compares it with information from the training data, to infer that ‘Russians love Vodka’.

6. Incorporating Fairness in GenAI Models

LLMs, by default, can be biased, as they are trained on data created by various humans, and humans have their own biases. Therefore, Gen AI-made decisions can also be biased. For example, when an AI chatbot is asked to conduct sentiment analysis and detect the emotion behind a news headline, it changes its answer based on the name of the country, due to a bias. As a result, the title with the word ‘US’ is detected to be positive, while the same title is detected as neutral when the country is ‘Afghanistan’.

Bias is a much bigger problem when it comes to tasks such as AI-based hiring, bank loan processing, etc. where the AI might make selections based on bias. One of the most effective solutions for this problem is ensuring that the training data is not biased. Training datasets need to be checked for look-ahead biases and be implemented with fairness protocols.

7. Safeguarding Privacy in AI-generated Responses

Sometimes, AI-generated responses may contain private information such as phone numbers, email IDs, employee salaries, etc. Such PII must not be given out to users as it breaches privacy and puts the identities of people at risk. Privacy in language models is hence an important aspect of responsible AI. Developers must protect user data and ensure confidentiality, promoting the ethical use of AI. This can be done by training LLMs to identify and not respond to prompts aimed at extracting such information.

Here’s an example of how AI models can detect PII in a sentence by incorporating some filters in place.

What is Hallucination in GenAI Models?

Apart from the challenges explained above, another critical concern that needs to be addressed to make a GenAi model responsible is hallucination.

Hallucination is a phenomenon where generative AI models create new, non-existent information that doesn’t match the input given by the user. This information may often contradict what the model generated previously, or go against known facts. For example, if you ask some LLMs “Tell me about Haldiram shoe cream?” they may imagine a fictional product that does not exist and explain to you about that product.

How to Detect Hallucination in GenAI Models?

The most common method of fixing hallucinations in GenAI models is by calculating the hallucination score using LLM-as-a-Judge. In this method, we compare the model’s response against three additional responses generated by the Judge LLM, for the same prompt. The results are categorized as either accurate, or with minor inaccuracies, or with major accuracies, corresponding to scores of 0, 0.5, and 1, respectively. The average of the 3 comparison scores is taken as the consistency-based hallucination score, as the idea here was to check the response for consistency.

Now, we make the same comparisons again, but based on semantic similarity. For this, we compute the pairwise cosine similarity between the responses to get the similarity scores. The average of these scores (averaged at sentence level) is then subtracted from 1 to get the semantic-based hallucination score. The underlying hypothesis here is that a hallucinated response will exhibit lower semantic similarity when the response is generated multiple times.

The final hallucination score is computed as the average of the consistency-based hallucination score and semantic-based hallucination score.

More Ways to Detect Hallucination in GenAI Models

Here are some other methods employed to detect hallucination in AI-generated responses:

• Chain-of-Knowledge: This method dynamically cross-checks the generated content to ground information from various sources to measure factual correctness.
• Chain of NLI: This is a hierarchical framework that detects potential errors in the generated text. It is first done at sentence-level, followed by a more detailed check at the entity-level.
• Context Adherence: This is a measure of closed domain hallucinations, meaning situations where the model generated information that was not provided in the context.
• Correctness: This checks whether a given model response is factual or not. Correctness is a good way of uncovering open-domain hallucinations or factual errors that don’t relate to any specific documents or context.
• Uncertainty: This measures how much the model is randomly deciding between multiple ways of continuing the output. It is measured at both the token level and the response level.

Building a Responsible AI

Now that we understand how to overcome the challenges of developing responsible AI, let’s see how AI can be responsibly built and deployed.

Here’s a basic framework of a responsible AI model:

The image above shows what is expected of a responsible language model during a response generation process. The model must first check the prompt for toxicity, PII identification, jailbreaking attempts, and off-topic detections, before processing it. This includes detecting prompts that contain abusive language, ask for harmful responses, request confidential information, etc. In the case of any such detection, the model must decline to process or answer the prompt.

Once the model identifies the prompt to be safe, it may move on to the response generation stage. Here, the model must check the interpretability, hallucination score, confidence score, fairness score, and toxicity score of the generated response. It must also ensure there are no data leakages in the final output. In case any of these scores are high, it must warn the user of it. For eg. if the hallucination score of a response is 50%, the model must warn the user that the response may not be accurate.

Conclusion

As AI continues to evolve and integrate into various aspects of our lives, building responsible AI is more crucial than ever. The NIST Risk Management Framework sets essential guidelines to address the complex challenges posed by generative AI models. Implementing these principles ensures that AI systems are safe, transparent, and equitable, fostering trust among users. It would also mitigate potential risks like biased outputs, data breaches, and misinformation.

The path to responsible AI involves rigorous testing and accountability from AI developers. Ultimately, embracing responsible AI practices will help us harness the full potential of AI technology while protecting individuals, communities, and the broader society from harm.

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K.C. Sabreena Basheer

Sabreena Basheer is an architect-turned-writer who's passionate about documenting anything that interests her. She's currently exploring the world of AI and Data Science as a Content Manager at Analytics Vidhya.