Discriminatory Effects Alleged in Pennsylvania County's AI Tool: A Call to Action for Trustworthy AI

April 10, 2017

The American Civil Liberty Union (ACLU) analysis of Allegheny County's Family Screening Tool, an AI-powered decision-support system for predicting child abuse or neglect risk, found the tool to disproportionately screen in Black families and assign higher risk scores to households with disabled residents. This AI incident maps to the Govern function in HISPI Project Cerebellum Trusted AI Model (TAIM). Ready to help ensure safe and secure AI? JOIN US
Alleged deployer
allegheny-county
Alleged developer
rhema-vaithianathan, emily-putnam-hornstein, centre-for-social-data-analytics
Alleged harmed parties
black-families-in-allegheny, households-with-disabled-people-in-allegheny, hackneys-family

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/502

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.