HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

NHK Terminates AI Translation Service After Geopolitical Naming Error

February 10, 2025

NHK announced the termination of its AI-powered multilingual subtitle service following an automatic translation error. The incident, which occurred on February 10th, 2025 during a news segment, highlighted the service's rendering of 'Senkaku Islands' as 'Diaoyu Islands,' the Chinese designation for the disputed territory. This underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices. For those interested in shaping the future of responsible AI governance, consider joining HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) to help prevent such incidents and ensure harm prevention through guardrails for AI.

This incident serves as a stark reminder of the need for reliable and accurate AI translations. By contributing to the HISPI Project Cerebellum AI Incident Database, we can collectively work towards safe and secure AI practices.

Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
nhk
Alleged developer
google
Alleged harmed parties
nhk, government-of-japan, nhk-viewers, public-trust-in-the-media, japan-china-relations

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/934

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.