Incident 156: Amazon Reportedly Sold Products and Recommended Frequently Bought Together Items That Aid Suicide Attempts
Description: Despite complaints notifying Amazon about the sale of various products that had been used to aid suicide attempts, its recommendation system reportedly continued selling them and suggesting their frequently bought-together items.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Amazon developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed people attempting suicides.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
156
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2022-02-04
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
The pleas to Amazon were explicit. A food preservative sold by the online retailer and other e-commerce sites was being used as a poison to die by suicide.
“Please stop selling this product,” began one review, posted on Amazon in July 2019 …
Preliminary Statement
This is an action against Amazon.com, Inc. (“Amazon”) and Loudwolf, Inc. (“Loudwolf”) (collectively “Defendants"), which profit by selling a deadly chemical they know is used by children to die by suicide.
Amazon is gu…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
