Two founding committee members of the PennWest Center for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies recently put their expertise to good use in the name of creating safer, more secure AI models. 

Dennis Carson, Deputy Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer and Jennifer Williams, Manager of Learning Technology Services, participated in the Gray Swan Arena –an event that challenges participants to outsmart AI and expose its vulnerabilities in order to improve the security of the latest AI models. 

Run by Gray Swan, an AI safety and security company, the event asked participants to “jailbreak” – craft inputs or applying techniques that trick models into bypassing their restrictions, enabling them to generate unsafe outputs – the most recent competition was against OpenAI o3-mini prior to its public release.  

Only 3.6% of the prompts successfully bypassed the AI models’ guardrails, illustrating the critical thinking and analytical skills needed for the task. Carson and Williams performed notably, with Carson ranking 11th and Williams 22nd among the top 25 of more than 1000 participants. 

Williams and Carson emphasized the importance of “ethical hacking” and the need to build more secure AI platforms.  

“I see a lot of benefits to incorporating AI, but it has to be done delicately because it’s so easy to manipulate it in the wrong way,” said Williams, who intends to present findings at two PASSHE educational technology conferences.  

Carson, who was awarded 2024 CISO of the Year by the Pittsburgh Technology Council, is actively involved in panels and presentations on technology and security, stressed the importance of understanding AI's limitations and the potential risks associated with its deployment.   

“AI is something that you want to stay ahead of,” he said. “From the security side, it has great application, but there are downsides, too. I want PennWest to be at the forefront of technology, but do it in a safe way.”  

Williams plans to present her findings at the 60th annual RECAP conference at West Chester and as a co-panelist at Shippensburg University’s AI Conference, focusing on the ethical implementation of AI in education.