AI Incidents
Real-world cases where AI systems caused harm, classified by risk domain and entity. Data sourced from 
AIID and classified by 
MIT AI Risk Initiative. CC BY-SA 4.0
159 incidents
Tiny Changes Let False Claims About COVID-19, Voting Evade Facebook Fact Checks
Avaaz, an international advocacy group, released a review of Facebook's misinformation identifying software showing that the labeling process failed to label 42% of false information posts, most surrounding COVID-19 and the 2020 USA Presidential Election.
Philosophy AI Allegedly Used To Generate Mixture of Innocent and Harmful Reddit Posts
Philosopher AI, a GPT-3-powered controversial text generator, was allegedly used by an anonymous actor on AskReddit subreddit, whose posts featured a mixture of harmless stories, conspiracy theories, and sensitive topic discussions.
Facebook Provided Offensive Translation for King of Thailand's Birthday Ceremony
Facebook's Thai-English translation gave an inappropriate mistranslation on Thai PBS's Facebook live broadcast of the King of Thailand’s candle-lighting birthday ceremony.
Facebook Political Ad Delivery Algorithms Inferred Users' Political Alignment, Inhibiting Political Campaigns' Reach
Facebook's political ad delivery system reportedly differentiated the price of user reach based on their inferred political alignment, inhibiting political campaigns' ability to reach voters with diverse political views, which allegedly reinforces political polarization and creates informational filter bubbles.
YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm Allegedly Promoted Climate Misinformation Content
YouTube’s recommendation system and its focus on views and watched time were alleged by an advocacy group to have driven people towards climate denial and misinformation videos.
Chinese Chatbots Question Communist Party
Chatbots on Chinese messaging service expressed anti-China sentiments, causing the messaging service to remove and reprogram the chatbots.
Deepfake Obama Introduction of Deepfakes
University of Washington researchers made a deepfake of Obama, followed by Jordan Peele
“Amazon’s Choice” Algorithm Failed to Recommend Functional Products and Prone to Review Manipulation
Amazon’s “Amazon’s Choice” algorithm recommended poor-quality defective products and were reportedly susceptible to manipulation by inauthentic reviews.
Defamation via AutoComplete
Google's autocomplete feature alongside its image search results resulted in the defamation of people and businesses.