Facebook's Automatic Translation Error: 'Good Morning' Misinterpreted as 'Hurt Them', Triggering Arrest - Highlighting Importance of Safe and Secure AI
October 17, 2017
Facebook's automatic language translation software misinterpreted an Arabic post saying 'Good morning' into Hebrew saying 'hurt them', resulting in a Palestinian man's arrest in Beitar Illit, Israel. This incident underscores the need for trustworthy AI and responsible governance, ensuring harm prevention and adherence to safety standards. This AI incident maps to the Govern function in HISPI Project Cerebellum Trusted AI Model (TAIM). Ready to help shape responsible AI? JOIN US
- Alleged deployer
- Alleged developer
- Alleged harmed parties
- unnamed-palestinian-facebook-user, palestinian-facebook-users, arabic-speaking-facebook-users, facebook-users
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/72
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.