Responsible AI

AI Applications lets developers tap into the power of Google's foundation models, search expertise, and conversational AI technologies to create enterprise-grade generative AI applications. As an early-stage technology, its evolving capabilities and uses create potential for misapplication, misuse, and unintended or unforeseen consequences. For example, AI Applications can generate output that you don't expect, including text that's offensive, insensitive, or factually incorrect.

Given these risks and complexities, AI Applications is designed with Google's AI Principles in mind. However, it is important for developers to understand and test their models to deploy safely and responsibly. To aid developers, AI Applications has built-in safety filters to help customers block potentially harmful outputs within their use case. For more information, see Safety settings for Vertex AI Search.

When AI Applications is integrated into a customer's unique use case and context, additional responsible AI considerations and model limitations might need to be considered. We encourage customers to leverage fairness, interpretability, privacy, and security recommended practices.

Vertex AI Search offers SafeSearch filters to filter explicit website search results. Explicit results might include content like pornography, violence, and gore. SafeSearch filtering is not available for private content.

Summarization (both for website search and private content) filters out responses such as derogatory, sexually explicit, toxic, or violent information. Additionally, the summarization response contains safety attributes, which include "harmful categories" and topics that might be considered sensitive.

Website search

SafeSearch can be applied to public content indexed by Vertex AI Search, such as websites. When SafeSearch is on, Vertex AI Search helps filter out explicit content in a customer's Vertex AI Search results for all queries across images, videos, and websites. While those filters are not 100% accurate, we continuously evaluate and update filtering capabilities.

In certain contexts and use cases, customers might require access to a wide range of information, even if it includes explicit content, to gather comprehensive insights and results from Vertex AI Search. Customers can enable and disable safety filters using the API by setting safe_search to "true" or "false".

To enable SafeSearch for Vertex AI Search, use the following API call:

curl -X POST\
 -H "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth application-default print-access-token)"
 -H "Content-Type: application/json"\
"https://discoveryengine.googleapis.com/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/collections/default_collection/dataStores/DATA_STORE_ID/servingConfigs/default_config:search"
     -d '{
      "query": { "input": "FREE_TEXT"},
  "serving_config": "SERVING_CONFIG_ID",
  "safe_search": "true",
}'

To enable SafeSearch for Search with follow-ups in Vertex AI Search, use the following API call:

curl -X POST \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth print-access-token)" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
"https://discoveryengine.googleapis.com/v1beta/projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/collections/default_collection/dataStores/DATA_STORE_ID/conversations/CONVERSATION_ID:converse" \
-d '{
  "query": { "input": "FREE_TEXT"},
  "serving_config": "SERVING_CONFIG_ID",
  "safe_search": "true",
}'

The safe_search setting applies to search results and also to Vertex AI Search outputs like summarization (which is based on the search results).

Vertex AI Search outputs, such as summarization, are assessed against a list of safety attributes which filter potentially harmful content even when safe_search is turned off.

Summarization for private content and website search

Vertex AI Search outputs, such as summarization, are assessed against a list of safety attributes, which filters potentially harmful content such as derogatory, sexually explicit, toxic, or violent information, even when safe_search for website search is turned off. Additionally, you can filter out responses which include "harmful categories" and topics that might be considered sensitive by using safetyAttributes in the Vertex AI Search API response.

Fallback responses

If the summarization model responds to a request with an empty string or a generic response, it means that either the input or the output is triggering a safety filter. In the Vertex AI Search API response, SummarySkippedReason is set to BLOCKED_DUE_TO_POTENTIAL_POLICY_VIOLATION if a potential policy violation is detected.

If you think that a safety filter is being inappropriately triggered, report this issue via the Google Cloud console.

Additional resources