Incident 588: Australian Terrorism Prediction Tool Disparately Impacts Persons with Autism
Description: An independent report found that the Vera-2R tool, designed to predict the risk of future terrorist activities, considered autism as a risk factor despite lacking empirical evidence to support this claim. The report called into question the tool's overall validity and reliability, stating it was "extremely poor" at accurately predicting risk. The inclusion of autism as a risk factor had potentially serious implications for the tool's use and credibility.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Unspecified developed an AI system deployed by New South Wales Government and Australian Federal Government, which harmed people with autism , lawyers and other experts who were not informed of the tool's limitations , Individuals assessed as high-risk based on the flawed criteria and General public.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
588
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2023-05-12
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
theguardian.com · 2023
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
A tool designed to predict future crime in terrorist offenders considered them at greater risk of offending if they were autistic despite having no empirical basis to do so, an independent report has found.
The report into the Vera-2R tool,…
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.
