Protect Your Business & Taking Advantage of AI

Three tips for managing the risk to your business

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing the way businesses operate. Some say that it will revolutionise work as we know it, others claim that it is too dangerous and should be left alone. Concerns include its ability to generate untruthful or biased information, and its proven penchant for making up information – known as “hallucinations”.

Despite the controversy, AI is rapidly making its way into mainstream use. With the overnight sensation of ChatGPT by Open AI and recently Google’s version, Bard, we are seeing an exponential social uptake of technology with many users unaware of the ramifications. These large language models offer instantaneous access to well-presented content. In addition to these well-known platforms, there are an emerging plethora of AI tools offering the weird, wonderful and obscure including music creation, image creation, writing code.

Different types of AI benefiting business

With these new tools providing easy access, there has been a huge uptake by business users taking advantages of the efficiencies of an automated content generation tool. Key business uses include:

• Chat bots for instant online customer service
• Content creation: from policy writing to script writing, blog writing to language translation, AI tools can provide immense productivity gains
• Video and audio creation: from scripting to editing, music composition to voice-over recording, there are a range of AI-driven tools to streamline multimedia production
• Image generation: creation of bespoke, tailored images in a split second
• Transcription and meeting assistants: taking the hard work of meeting administration

Business can benefit from the enhanced efficiency and automation, improved decision-making through advanced insight and vast amounts of data and the ability to provide highly personalised customer experiences. But with this exciting new frontier comes risk.

Three key security concerns posed by AI

• Company IP exposure: when teams are uploading company information or documentation to prompt AI tools, this data is being collected, stored and is at risk at being made public either unintentionally or via a hack.
• Data and privacy breaches: AI systems are trained on large amounts of data, which can be a valuable target for attackers. If an attacker can gain access to this data, they will get access to any data that has been used to train the model, including what you have input into the model. It’s critical that businesses understand that any data put into an AI model puts it out into the public arena. Confidential company information can easily be compromised when businesses use these tools.
• Plagiarism and copyright infringement: because AI systems are trained on existing content, there is a lot of uncharted territory when it comes to plagiarism and copyright. Being careful to ensure that you are not accidentally copying existing content is a must.

How to Mitigate AI Security Risks

The key to using AI safely and effectively is to be aware of the security risks and to take steps to mitigate these. We recommend three key starting points for managing the security risk posed by AI.

1. Understand how AI could pose a risk to your business. This can be specific to each unique business and you’re best to speak with your IT provider to understand your unique risk profile.
2. Create and share your business AI policies with all staff. By having a policy in place and communicating it to your team, you’re setting a clear directive and managing the risk through awareness.
   Employees should be given the policy to understand how they can use AI responsibly within the guidelines of your business. Most importantly, they must be aware of what they can, and cannot input into an AI model.
3. Provide AI training. As important as Work Health Safety or any of your other people policies, an AI and digital use policy needs to be reinforced by regular training to ensure your team have clearly interpreted your policy and are actively implementing it. This training can also cover how to identify and report cyberattacks.

At Think Technology, we know tech, but we talk business. We’re all about simplifying IT while and keeping you and your team secure. If you want to know more about AI security, get in touch.