Incident 532: AI translation is jeopardizing Afghan asylum claims
Description: A Pashto-speaking refugee's asylum claim was denied by a US agency for a discrepancy between oral and written recount of an event allegedly due to an error of their automated translation tool which swapped pronouns of her written statement from "I" to "we".
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: unknown developed an AI system deployed by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which harmed anonymous Pashto-speaking refugee , Pashto-speaking asylum seekers and Dari-speaking asylum seekers.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
532
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2020-06-20
Editors
Khoa Lam
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
restofworld.org · 2023
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
In 2020, Uma Mirkhail got a firsthand demonstration of how damaging a bad translation can be.
A crisis translator specializing in Afghan languages, Mirkhail was working with a Pashto-speaking refugee who had fled Afghanistan. A U.S. court h…
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.
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