Australian Terrorism Prediction Tool Disparately Impacts Persons with Autism
May 12, 2023
An independent report found that the Vera-2R tool, designed to predict the risk of future terrorist activities, considered autism as a risk factor despite lacking empirical evidence to support this claim. The report called into question the tool's overall validity and reliability, stating it was "extremely poor" at accurately predicting risk. The inclusion of autism as a risk factor had potentially serious implications for the tool's use and credibility.
- Alleged deployer
- new-south-wales-government, australian-federal-government
- Alleged developer
- unspecified
- Alleged harmed parties
- people-with-autism, lawyers-and-other-experts-who-were-not-informed-of-the-tool's-limitations, individuals-assessed-as-high-risk-based-on-the-flawed-criteria, general-public
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/588
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.