Amazon Censors Gay Books

May 23, 2008

An alleged 'cataloging error' at Amazon resulted in the removal of books depicting gay and lesbian themes from their sales ranking, thereby reducing their visibility. This instance highlights the need for trustworthy AI governance to prevent such incidents.

This incident sheds light on the importance of implementing robust guardrails for AI, as it raises concerns about safe and secure AI practices. The HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Measure) function can help assess and mitigate similar issues in the future. For those interested in shaping the discourse around responsible AI governance and incident management, JOIN US.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.694, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.684, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.683, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: amazon
Alleged developer: amazon
Alleged harmed parties: amazon-customers

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/15

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.