Fatalities Reportedly Occur Despite VioGén Algorithm's Low or Negligible Risk Scores

July 18, 2024

The VioGén algorithm, intended to aid Spanish police in risk assessment of domestic violence incidents, reportedly failed to provide adequate protection for Lobna Hemid, resulting in her murder. Since 2007, 247 women have been killed after being assessed by VioGén, with 55 of these cases scoring as negligible or low risk in the algorithm. This underscores the importance of trustworthy AI governance and the need for safe and secure AI practices.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.735, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 3.1 — similarity 0.690, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 3.2 — similarity 0.677, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: spanish-law-enforcement-agencies, spanish-interior-ministry
Alleged developer: viogen-algorithm-development-team, spanish-law-enforcement-agencies, spanish-interior-ministry
Alleged harmed parties: women-in-spain, stefany-gonzalez-escarraman, spanish-general-public, maria, luz, lobna-hemid, eva-jaular, 247-women-in-spain-(unnamed)

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/747

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.