Pregnancy detection fail: AI system overlooks teenager's pregnancy

A 15-year-old girl in the UK was mistakenly labeled as 'female' by Target's AI system, despite being pregnant. The system failed to detect her pregnancy status due to a lack of data about teen pregnancies. This oversight underscores the need for responsible AI and robust data governance in sensitive areas.

Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.2 — similarity 0.417, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.409, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.402, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/170

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.