Microsoft Rolls Out LLM-Powered Tools To Strengthen AI Chatbot's Security Against Manipulation

Microsoft has designed a number of new features which will be easy to use for Azure customers who are not hiring groups of red teamers to test the AI services. Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s chief product officer of responsible AI, in an interview with The Verge, said, “We know that customers don’t all have deep expertise in prompt injection attacks or hateful content, so the evaluation system generates the prompts needed to simulate these types of attacks. Three features that are now available in the preview on Azure AI are: Prompt Shields: Blocks prompt injections or malicious prompts from external documents that instruct models to go against their training. Bird acknowledges concerns about companies determining what is suitable for AI models, so her team has implemented a feature in Azure that allows customers to toggle hate speech or violence filtering, ensuring greater customization. However, since Azure's model repository includes numerous AI models, users of less popular open-source systems might need to manually configure the safety features for those models.