AI Mishap: Grocery Store Robot Fabio Provides Unhelpful Answers and Scares Customers - A Case for Responsible AI

January 22, 2018

In an unfortunate instance, Heriot-Watt University's grocery store robot, Fabio, failed to provide helpful responses to customer inquiries. This lapse led to multiple customers feeling frightened, as reported by the grocery store Margiotta. Such incidents underscore the need for safe and secure AI, highlighting the importance of trustworthy AI development. This AI incident maps to the Govern function in HISPI Project Cerebellum Trusted AI Model (TAIM). JOIN US
Alleged deployer
heriot-watt-university, margiotta
Alleged developer
heriot-watt-university
Alleged harmed parties
store-patrons

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/64

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.