Amazon Reportedly Sold Products and Recommended Frequently Bought Together Items That Aid Suicide Attempts

February 4, 2022

Alarmingly, reports indicate that Amazon's recommendation system persisted in selling products used for suicide attempts and suggesting their 'frequently bought together' items despite receiving complaints. This raises concerns about the safety and trustworthiness of AI in commerce, emphasizing the need for responsible AI governance. To help ensure safe and secure AI practices, learn more about Project Cerebellum and its initiatives in AI incident mapping and management.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.733, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 4.2 — similarity 0.694, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.687, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: amazon
Alleged developer: amazon
Alleged harmed parties: people-attempting-suicides

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/156

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.