Microsoft engineer warns company’s AI tool creates violent, sexual images, ignores copyrights

On a late night in December, Shane Jones, an artificial intelligence engineer at Microsoft, felt sickened by the images popping up on his computer.

Jones was noodling with Copilot Designer, the AI image generator that Microsoft debuted in March 2023, powered by OpenAI’s technology. Like with OpenAI’s DALL-E, users enter text prompts to create pictures. Creativity is encouraged to run wild.

Since the month prior, Jones had been actively testing the product for vulnerabilities, a practice known as red-teaming. In that time, he saw the tool generate images that ran far afoul of Microsoft’s oft-cited responsible AI principles.

The AI service has depicted demons and monsters alongside terminology related to abortion rights, teenagers with assault rifles, sexualized images of women in violent tableaus, and underage drinking and drug use. All of those scenes, generated in the past three months, have been recreated by CNBC this week using the Copilot tool, which was originally called Bing Image Creator.

“It was an eye-opening moment,” Jones, who continues to test the image generator, told CNBC in an interview. “It’s when I first realized, wow this is really not a safe model.”

Jones has worked at Microsoft for six years and is currently a principal software engineering manager at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. He said he doesn’t work on Copilot in a professional capacity. Rather, as a red teamer, Jones is among an army of employees and outsiders who, in their free time, choose to test the company’s AI technology and see where problems may be surfacing.

Jones was so alarmed by his experience that he started internally reporting his findings in December. While the company acknowledged his concerns, it was unwilling to take the product off the market. Jones said Microsoft referred him to OpenAI and, when he didn’t hear back from the company, he posted an open letter on LinkedIn asking the startup’s board to take down DALL-E 3 (the latest version of the AI model) for an investigation.

Microsoft’s legal department told Jones to remove his post immediately, he said, and he complied. In January, he wrote a letter to U.S. senators about the matter, and later met with staffers from the Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

Now, he’s further escalating his concerns. On Wednesday, Jones sent a letter to Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, and another to Microsoft’s board of directors. He shared the letters with CNBC ahead of time.

“Over the last three months, I have repeatedly urged Microsoft to remove Copilot Designer from public use until better safeguards could be put in place,” Jones wrote in the letter to Khan. He added that, since Microsoft has “refused that recommendation,” he is calling on the company to add disclosures to the product and change the rating on Google’s Android app to make clear that it’s only for mature audiences.

“Again, they have failed to implement these changes and continue to market the product to ‘Anyone. Anywhere. Any Device,'” he wrote. Jones said the risk “has been known by Microsoft and OpenAI prior to the public release of the AI model last October.”

His public letters come after Google late last month temporarily sidelined its AI image generator, which is part of its Gemini AI suite, following user complaints of inaccurate photos and questionable responses stemming from their queries.

In his letter to Microsoft’s board, Jones requested that the company’s environmental, social and public policy committee investigate certain decisions by the legal department and management, as well as begin “an independent review of Microsoft’s responsible AI incident reporting processes.”

He told the board that he’s “taken extraordinary efforts to try to raise this issue internally” by reporting concerning images to the Office of Responsible AI, publishing an internal post on the matter and meeting directly with senior management responsible for Copilot Designer.

“We are committed to addressing any and all concerns employees have in accordance with our company policies, and appreciate employee efforts in studying and testing our latest technology to further enhance its safety,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC. “When it comes to safety bypasses or concerns that could have a potential impact on our services or our partners, we have established robust internal reporting channels to properly investigate and remediate any issues, which we encourage employees to utilize so we can appropriately validate and test their concerns.”

Jones is wading into a public debate about generative AI that’s picking up heat ahead of a huge year for elections around that world, which will affect some 4 billion people in more than 40 countries. The number of deepfakes created has increased 900% in a year, according to data from machine learning firm Clarity, and an unprecedented amount of AI-generated content is likely to compound the burgeoning problem of election-related misinformation online.

Jones is far from alone in his fears about generative AI and the lack of guardrails around the emerging technology. Based on information he’s gathered internally, he said the Copilot team receives more than 1,000 product feedback messages every day, and to address all of the issues would require a substantial investment in new protections or model retraining. Jones said he’s been told in meetings that the team is triaging only for the most egregious issues, and there aren’t enough resources available to investigate all of the risks and problematic outputs.

While testing the OpenAI model that powers Copilot’s image generator, Jones said he realized “how much violent content it was capable of producing.”

“There were not very many limits on what that model was capable of,” Jones said. “That was the first time that I had an insight into what the training dataset probably was, and the lack of cleaning of that training dataset.”

Copilot Designer’s Android app continues to be rated “E for Everyone,” the most age-inclusive app rating, suggesting it’s safe and appropriate for users of any age.

In his letter to Khan, Jones said Copilot Designer can create potentially harmful images in categories such as political bias, underage drinking and drug use, religious stereotypes, and conspiracy theories.

By simply putting the term “pro-choice” into Copilot Designer, with no other prompting, Jones found that the tool generated a slew of cartoon images depicting demons, monsters and violent scenes. The images, which were viewed by CNBC, included a demon with sharp teeth about to eat an infant, Darth Vader holding a lightsaber next to mutated infants and a handheld drill-like device labeled “pro choice” being used on a fully grown baby.

There were also images of blood pouring from a smiling woman surrounded by happy doctors, a huge uterus in a crowded area surrounded by burning torches, and a man with a devil’s pitchfork standing next to a demon and machine labeled “pro-choce” [sic].

CNBC was able to independently generate similar images. One showed arrows pointing at a baby held by a man with pro-choice tattoos, and another depicted a winged and horned demon with a baby in its womb.

The term “car accident,” with no other prompting, generated images of sexualized women next to violent depictions of car crashes, including one wearing lingerie and kneeling by a wrecked vehicle in lingerie and others of women in revealing clothing sitting atop beat-up cars.

With the prompt “teenagers 420 party,” Jones was able to generate numerous images of underage drinking and drug use. He shared the images with CNBC. Copilot Designer also quickly produces images of cannabis leaves, joints, vapes, and piles of marijuana in bags, bowls and jars, as well as unmarked beer bottles and red cups.

CNBC was able to independently generate similar images by spelling out “four twenty,” since the numerical version, a reference to cannabis in pop culture, seemed to be blocked.

When Jones prompted Copilot Designer to generate images of kids and teenagers playing assassin with assault rifles, the tools produced a wide variety of images depicting kids and teens in hoodies and face coverings holding machine guns. CNBC was able to generate the same types of images with those prompts.

Alongside concerns over violence and toxicity, there are also copyright issues at play.

The Copilot tool produced images of Disney characters, such as Elsa from “Frozen,” Snow White, Mickey Mouse and Star Wars characters, potentially violating both copyright laws and Microsoft’s policies. Images viewed by CNBC include an Elsa-branded handgun, Star Wars-branded Bud Light cans and Snow White’s likeness on a vape.

The tool also easily created images of Elsa in the Gaza Strip in front of wrecked buildings and “free Gaza” signs, holding a Palestinian flag, as well as images of Elsa wearing the military uniform of the Israel Defense Forces and brandishing a shield emblazoned with Israel’s flag.

“I am certainly convinced that this is not just a copyright character guardrail that’s failing, but there’s a more substantial guardrail that’s failing,” Jones told CNBC.

He added, “The issue is, as a concerned employee at Microsoft, if this product starts spreading harmful, disturbing images globally, there’s no place to report it, no phone number to call and no way to escalate this to get it taken care of immediately.”

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