Microsoft AI Poll Allegedly Causes Reputational Harm of The Guardian Newspaper

October 31, 2023

Microsoft's AI system displayed an inaccurate and insensitive poll beside a Guardian article, speculating on the cause of Lilie James's death. This led to public outrage, allegedly causing reputational harm to The Guardian. Microsoft has admitted the mistake, disabling similar polls, and revising their AI content policies for safe and secure AI practices.

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Alleged deployer
microsoft
Alleged developer
microsoft
Alleged harmed parties
the-guardian, family-of-lilie-james

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/612

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

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