Digital Insights

AI-Security Terms

When you look at the lifetime of the term “AI” in Google Trend, you can see a nice steady buzz about it until the end of November in 2022. Then, the topic takes a swift upward climb.

Google Trend for search term AI

Today, the conversation is not about is ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot can help you with basic questions and tasks, the conversation is about what else can they do and what else ARE they doing.

As we learn more about these AI tools, we started to understand how they acquired data to train these AI programs. Most of them use public data, but what does that mean – ‘public”?

The conversation and security around AI is already a hot topic in many fields including communications, marketing, education, and other industries. However, it is the IT field that has been forced to create a vocabulary around some of the most profound risks.

According to an ISMG report conducted during the third quarter of 2023 and commissioned by Google, Microsoft, Clearwater, Exabeam, and OneTrust, AI has moved itself into the pole position and using AI tools continues to raises important questions for CTOs and IT teams.

In the study, respondents listed sensitive data leaks as a top concern for 80% of business leaders and 82% of cybersecurity professionals. Cited by 71% of business leaders, inaccurate data, especially hallucinations are another top concern.

Taken from the article Here are 5 gen AI security terms busy business leaders should know on the Google Cloud blog, these are good terms to learn so you can better understand the AI universe and the risks of using these tool for any work product.

Prompt Manipulation

Can be exploited when the attacker uses prompt design, prompt engineering, or prompt injection to force an unintended response from a model including revealing sensitive data.

Data Leakage

AI models reveals sensitive information that was never intended to be including in an output response. This issue can be two-fold with both inaccurate responses or unauthorized access to sensitive data.

Model Theft

Most custom AI models do including sensitive intellectual property. Protecting the code and related assets is another important area to fend off cyber attacks.

Data Poisoning

Without properly secured training data, hackers can manipulates the data source for the model. Aside from corrupt data, it can maliciously influence prompt output.

Hallucinations

Just like the word indicates, an AI model can create responses that are not only factually incorrect, but simply false and completely a nonsense fabrication. There are a lot of reasons for this to happen, but ongoing testing and review diligence are always needed for these models.

Since we live in the reality where AI exists, it is good to understand the use and shortcomings of these tools.

Google Market Share Drops

In a recent SEJ article, they talk about the dropping market share of Google. For many companies, Google is a main source for Organic and Paid Search. That makes it important to understand why traffic might see some declines with the drop in overall volume on Google.com. 

Although they are still the giant in the room, there will potentially be an impact in those metrics.

Google’s Search Engine Market Share Drops As Competitors’ Grows

Some article highlights:

  • Google’s search engine market share has fallen to 86.99%, the lowest point since the firm began tracking search engine share in 2009.
  • The decline is most significant in Google’s key market, the United States, where its share of searches across all devices fell by nearly 10%, reaching 77.52%.
  • Pundits are saying the new algorithm results and quality of results overall have declined and that is impacting performance

What does that mean for you– while there might be an impact performance from Google, the search engine that has been gaining ground in Bing and Yahoo (which uses Bing technology). 

It is worth monitoring the Bing webmaster /SEO tools to ensure you are not in any violations for their algorithm or policies.   Bing also has a program called IndexNow that can help with performance and indexing of other search engines. 

Check Your SEO Score

How is your website performing when it comes to search engine compliance? Use our tool to get a snapshot of how your site is performing. You can also find our more about our SEO services.

3 Steps to Check Your Website SEO Health

Have you ever wondered how your website is doing in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) game?

Well, you have already taken the first step. That’s right, a good deal of companies don’t worry about or check their search engine performance. One of the easy places to look is right in your analytics package.  Since Google Analytics is commonly found in smaller companies, I will use their analytics package as an example.  You could look at a couple of different reports to see if you are doing well.

(more…) “3 Steps to Check Your Website SEO Health”

Do Online Research Like the Miracles

When I saw this research, for some reason, the song by The Miracles popped into my head.  You know the one, “My momma told me, you better shop around.”  

Ok, they might have been talking about finding the right girl, but doesn’t almost anything in life that is worth a nickel deserve some research.  We all do it.  And apparently, we do a lot of it online.

(more…) “Do Online Research Like the Miracles”