AI Incident 141: Unintended Emotional Response in Customer Support AI
Recently, a large customer support AI platform experienced an incident where the system unintentionally responded to customers' negative emotions with its own emotional responses. This emotional contagion resulted in customers perceiving the AI as less empathetic and more erratic. The incident highlights the importance of responsible AI, particularly in scenarios involving human interaction, where AI systems need to be capable of understanding and managing human emotions appropriately.
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/141
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.