Facebook translates 'good morning' into 'attack them', leading to arrest

October 17, 2017

Facebook's automatic language translation software incorrectly translated an Arabic post saying 'Good morning' into Hebrew saying 'hurt them.' This mishap led to the arrest of a Palestinian man in Beitar Illit, Israel. Incidents like this underscore the need for safe and secure AI practices. For those interested in shaping trustworthy AI governance, join us at HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern), where we map, measure, manage, and mitigate such incidents.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.621, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.3 — similarity 0.618, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.1 — similarity 0.613, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: facebook
Alleged developer: facebook
Alleged harmed parties: unnamed-palestinian-facebook-user, palestinian-facebook-users, arabic-speaking-facebook-users, facebook-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/72

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.