AI: Take these steps now to safeguard your organization

No other technology today has the level of hype artificial intelligence (AI) has. Countless news articles, blog posts, and videos have predicted everything from drastic changes in the workplace to the complete destruction of humanity. With all this discussion, it can be difficult to determine exactly how, and to what extent, your organization will be affected. Work product created by AI is fraught with risk. For example, some AI tools can “make up” information (known as “hallucinations”), rendering it unreliable in certain contexts. Also, if AI is trained based on someone else’s intellectual property, it may produce results that infringe on that intellectual property. And, information provided to an AI tool, if used to train future versions of it, can potentially be extracted, risking trade secret exposure.

With so many unknowns, here are three practical (and reasonable) actions you can take to ensure your organization is protected.

Three steps

First, ensure your organization has a policy to govern how AI is to be used or not used. A starting point may be creating a blacklist of AI services that aren’t permitted, including free online AI services whose reliability, data privacy policies, and AI training methodologies can’t be easily determined.