Portland Water Bureau SERVUS Algorithm Reportedly Allocates Utility Bill Discount to High-Wealth Consumer
October 14, 2024
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.
- Alleged deployer
- portland-water-bureau
- Alleged developer
- portland-water-bureau
- Alleged harmed parties
- tim-boyle, portland-water-bureau, low-income-portland-residents, city-of-portland
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/868
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
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