The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Department of Commerce agency that develops and tests technology for the U.S. government, corporations, and the general public, announced Monday the launch of NIST GenAI, a new program led by NIST to evaluate productive AI Technologies, including artificial intelligence that generates text and image.
A platform designed to evaluate various forms of artificial intelligence technology, NIST GenAI will release benchmarks, help build “content authenticity” (i.e. deepfake-checking) detection systems, and encourage the development of software to identify the source false or misleading information, NIST explains. get him recently launched NIST GenAI website and in a Press release.
“The NIST GenAI program will issue a series of challenge problems designed to assess and measure the capabilities and limitations of generative artificial intelligence technologies,” the press release states. “These assessments will be used to identify strategies to promote information integrity and guide the safe and responsible use of digital content.”
NIST’s first GenAI project is a pilot study to create systems that can reliably tell the difference between human-generated and AI-generated media, starting with text. (While many agencies aim to detect deepfakes, studies—and our own tests—have shown them to be unreliable, especially when it comes to text.) NIST GenAI invites teams from academia, industry, and research labs to submit either “generators” — Systems artificial intelligence to generate content — or “discriminators” — systems that attempt to identify content generated by artificial intelligence.
Authors in the study have to create abstracts with a topic and a set of documents, and authors have to detect whether a given abstract is written by artificial intelligence or not. To ensure fairness, NIST GenAI will provide the necessary data to educate producers and discriminators. systems trained on publicly available data will not be accepted, including but not limited to open models such as Meta’s Llama 3.
Registration for the pilot will begin on May 1, with results scheduled to be published in February 2025.
The release of NIST GenAI — and the deepfake-focused study — comes as deepfakes grow exponentially.
According to data from Clarity, a deepfake detection company, 900% more deepfakes have been created this year compared to the same time last year. It causes alarm, understandably so. ONE recently voting by YouGov found that 85% of Americans said they were concerned about the spread of deceptive deepfakes online.
The release of NIST GenAI is part of NIST’s response to President Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence, which established rules requiring greater transparency from AI companies about how their models work and established a series of new standards, including flagging content generated by artificial intelligence. .
It’s also the first announcement from NIST about artificial intelligence since the appointment of Paul Christiano, a former OpenAI researcher, to the agency’s AI Safety Institute.
Christiano was a controversial choice for his “doomerist” views. he once was foreseen that “there is a 50% chance that AI development will end up [humanity’s destruction]” critics — including scientists at NIST, reportedly — fear that Cristiano might encourage the AI Security Institute to focus on “fantasy scenarios” rather than realistic, more immediate dangers from AI.
NIST says NIST GenAI will inform the AI Security Institute’s work.