Censoring of LGBTQ+ Literature on Amazon: An Unintentional Error or AI Failure?

In a recent incident, Amazon admitted to the inadvertent censorship of over 57,310 books featuring LGBTQ+ themes. The company attributed the error to an 'unusual' technical glitch rather than a hacking attempt. This event underscores the importance of responsible AI governance and trustworthy AI models in preventing such incidents.

Matched TAIM controls

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

GOVERN 1.7 — similarity 0.495, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.489, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.489, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

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.