Description: The Portland Water Bureau's AI-driven pilot program for water bill discounts is reported to have randomly selected Tim Boyle, a wealthy high-water consumer, for a 40% discount intended for financially struggling customers. The program, developed by SERVUS, is meant to identify underserved individuals by using machine learning.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Portland Water Bureau and SERVUS developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Portland Water Bureau , Tim Boyle , Low-income Portland residents and City of Portland.
Implicated AI system: SERVUS
Incident Stats
Incident ID
868
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2024-10-14
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
wweek.com · 2024
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
Tim Boyle could not quite believe his eyes. The Columbia Sportswear CEO pays a lot of bills, personally and for his company. It’s unusual for a supplier to offer him a big discount on something for which he pays full price.
But there it was…
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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