Description: NHK announced the termination of its AI-powered multilingual subtitle service after an automatic translation error rendered "Senkaku Islands" as "Diaoyu Islands," the Chinese designation. The mistake, discovered on February 10th, 2025 during a news segment, led NHK to deem the service inappropriate. The AI-based subtitles, powered by Google Translate, had been in use since 2020.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Google developed an AI system deployed by NHK, which harmed NHK , Government of Japan , NHK viewers , Public trust in the media and Japan-China relations.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Google Translate API , NHK AI subtitle translator and NHK live streaming service
Incident Stats
Incident ID
934
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2025-02-10
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
On the 12th, NHK announced that it had found cases where the "Senkaku Islands" were displayed as the Chinese spelling "Diaoyu Islands" in its service, which provides live streaming of 24-hour English TV broadcasts on its website and app, an…
NHK announced on the 12th that it would end its multilingual subtitle service for live streaming of English international TV broadcasts on its official website and elsewhere on the 10th. The service had been using Google's artificial intell…
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.
Similar Incidents
Did our AI mess up? Flag the unrelated incidents
Similar Incidents
Did our AI mess up? Flag the unrelated incidents