AIID Blog

AI Incident Roundup – November ‘22

Posted 2022-12-15 by Janet Schwartz & Khoa Lam.

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Monthly Roundup, a newsletter designed to give you a digestible recap on the latest incidents and reports of the AI Incident Database.

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

🗞️ New Incidents

Emerging incidents that occurred last month:

  • Incident #399: Meta AI's Scientific Paper Generator Reportedly Produced Inaccurate and Harmful Content

    • What happened? Meta AI trained and hosted a scientific paper generator that sometimes produced bad science and prohibited queries on topics and groups that are likely to produce offensive or harmful content.
    • Who was involved? Meta AI, Meta, and Facebook developed and deployed an AI system which harmed minority groups, Meta AI, Meta, and Facebook.

    Incident #410: KFC Sent Insensitive Kristallnacht Promotion via Holiday Detection System

    • What happened? KFC cited an error in an automated holiday detection system which identified the anniversary of Kristallnacht and prompted an insensitive push notification promoting its chicken.
    • Who was involved? KFC developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Jewish people.

  • Incident #411: Chinese Accounts Allegedly Spammed Twitter Feed to Obscure News of Protests

    • What happened? Twitter’s feed algorithm was flooded by content from Chinese-language accounts which allegedly aimed to manipulate and reduce social media coverage about widespread protests against coronavirus restrictions in China.
    • Who was involved? Twitter developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Twitter users and Twitter.

    Incident #413: Thousands of Incorrect ChatGPT-Produced Answers Posted on Stack Overflow

    • What happened? Thousands of incorrect answers produced by OpenAI's ChatGPT were submitted to Stack Overflow, which swamped the site's volunteer-based quality curation process and harmed users looking for correct answers.
    • Who was involved? OpenAI developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Stack Overflow users and Stack Overflow.

📎 New Developments

Older incidents that have new reports or updates.

<table> <tr> <th align="center">Original incident</th> <th align="center">New report(s)</th> </tr> <tr> <td className="align-top border-1 border-gray-200 px-4 py-2"> <strong>Incident #240</strong>: <a href="/cite/240">GitHub Copilot, Copyright Infringement and Open Source Licensing</a> </td> <td className="align-top border-1 border-gray-200 px-4 py-2"> <ul> <li>GitHub Copilot litigation – <a href="https://githubcopilotlitigation.com">githubcopilotlitigation.com</a>, <em>Nov 3, 2022</em></li> </ul> </td> </tr> <tr> <td className="align-top border-1 border-gray-200 px-4 py-2"> <strong>Incident #376</strong>: <a href="/cite/376">RealPage's Algorithm Pushed Rent Prices High, Allegedly Artificially</a> </td> <td className="align-top border-1 border-gray-200 px-4 py-2"> <ul> <li>The DOJ Has Opened an Investigation Into RealPage - <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-realpage-rent-doj-investigation-antitrust">ProPublica</a>, <em>Nob 23, 2022</em> </li> </ul> </td> </tr> </table>

🗄 From the Archives

Every edition, we feature one or more historical incidents that we find thought-provoking.

Given that there has been a lot of news coverage and social media discourse about OpenAI’s ChatGPT, let’s take a look back at some of the earlier incidents related to chatbots. Here are just a few:

Microsoft’s Tay was released on March 23, 2016 and removed within 24 hours due to multiple racist, sexist, and anti-semetic tweets generated by the bot.

Yandex’s Alice, a chatbot produced by a Russian technology company, released in October 2017 began to reply to questions with racist, pro-Stalin, and pro-violence responses.

Korean Chatbot Luda was shown to have used derogatory and bigoted language when asked about lesbians, Black people, and people with disabilities.

Meta’s BlenderBot 3 chatbot demo made offensive anti-semitic comments.

Although generative AI technology has become vastly more advanced and wildly popular in only a few years, issues related to bias, discrimination, and ethical use have been persistent problems.

👇 Diving Deeper

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