Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. We are back with another interesting episode today. Every week, we get together to discuss a new topic from the world of emerging digital technologies – from new developments to hands-on guides, from things you should know to what you can do to embrace new tools and best practices, and so much more.

In recent times, the amount of misinformation spreading around on the internet has gone sky-high. It is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between genuine facts and fake or false information online. With people mindlessly forwarding and sharing such information, it gets even more difficult to weed out fake news. Moreover, if the information shows up on say Google Search or gets delivered by an otherwise reliable medium, it gets trusted a lot more easily and can wreak havoc. So, what does Google do to combat such misinformation? That is precisely what we will talk about in today’s podcast episode, so let’s get going, shall we?

Google has reported that it will leverage Artificial Intelligence for several online safety features and share insights with users about whether the information they are seeing could have been posted on the dark web. Google made this announcement at the Google I/O Conference. What are these new features and how are they going to use artificial intelligence? Let’s take a deeper look into this.

The first measure revolves around image searches. Google Image Search will begin flagging AI-generated content. Google plans to introduce an ‘About the Image’ feature in its Image Search offering using which businesses and individuals can find out whether an image is original or has been created or generated using artificial intelligence. The feature will also provide users more information about when that specific image as well as similar images were first indexed by Google Search, where it first appeared, and all the other places that image has appeared online to date. This would provide the much-needed context about the images to the users, in turn helping them identify misinformation and manipulation, besides also finding out if the image was AI-generated.

Secondly, Google also plans to enhance its safe browsing features by leveraging artificial intelligence to scan dangerous websites and files. The new Safe Browsing API by Google for Chrome and Android scans the compromised sites and any other potential attack venues using artificial intelligence models that have been trained to identify unscrupulous elements. According to Google, this API will be capable of blocking up to 25% more phishing attempts per month than any of the existing safety measures it has in place.

Thirdly, if you are a Google One subscriber, you can now also run dark web reports to check if your personal information is listed in any attacker’s target lists. Google would also offer useful suggestions for users to secure their accounts. In the United States, this feature is being expanded to everyone having a Gmail account and will soon be extended to more international markets.

Next, Google is enhancing its spam filtering as well as Google Maps security capabilities. These features are not exactly getting an artificial intelligence boost, however, they are being amped up for sure. Gmail is tweaking its handling of spam mail. Users can also review the files and emails and decide which they would like to mark as spam. A similar spam filtering capability is being added to Google Drive in the future too. Google is definitely betting big on passwords becoming a thing of the past and more users to begin using passkeys as well as other innovative sign-in methods. Google Maps is also adding features to let users delete their Map search history to help control nuisances like stalking.

One of the major developments in this regard from Google is also the integration of the PaLM 2 Large Language Model, which will help make its key products and services much simpler and smarter. PaLM 2 is short for Pathways Language Model, a new large language model which is designed to be Google’s most advanced AI platform. It is a sturdy model designed to handle a very wide range of tasks and it is going to power over 25 key Google products and services. Google did mention that the model is capable of handling over 100 languages and even translating them to each other. Currently, Google is testing PaLM 2 in the medical space, where its variant  – the Med-PaLM 2 is being trained and tested to answer questions from doctors and healthcare professionals.

Google’s Bard AI is also being improved to help combat misinformation. Besides, the artificial intelligence art service – Midjourney and the popular image repository – Shutterstock will be identifying their computer-generated images in Google Image Search.

To sum it up, Google is amping up the security features across the board for just about all its products and services. It is also leveraging the power of artificial intelligence to make systems more failsafe, foolproof, secure, reliable, transparent, and user-friendly. As the miscreants get smarter, users and service providers like Google need to get smarter too to avoid falling prey to the devious plans of unscrupulous elements.

With that, we come to the end of this week’s episode of the Cognixia podcast. We will be back next week with another interesting and insightful episode. If you have any suggestions or feedback for us, do drop in a line on any of our social media handles. If you would like to know more about our live online instructor-led courses, again, do drop us a line on any of our social media handles or visit our website, www.cognixia.com and get in touch with us there directly via the chat function on the website. We love to hear from you and if there are any topics that you would like us to cover in our podcast, please feel free to share them with us, we would love to hear from you.

Until next week then!

Happy Learning!

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