MIT AI Risk Repository · domain 1: Discrimination & Toxicity

1.1 Unfair discrimination and misrepresentation

Unequal treatment of individuals or groups by AI, often based on race, gender, or other sensitive characteristics, resulting in unfair outcomes and representation of those groups.

Risk entries
83
Frameworks citing it
12
Recorded incidents
118
Incidents since 2020
58
Causal entity (risk entries)
Causal entity (risk entries) 58 0 AI: 58 AI 58 Other: 13 Other 13 Human: 11 Human 11 Not coded: 1 Not coded 1
Causal entity (risk entries)
LabelValue
AI58
Other13
Human11
Not coded1
Intent (risk entries)
Intent (risk entries) 64 0 Unintentional: 64 Unintentional 64 Other: 16 Other 16 Intentional: 2 Intentional 2 Not coded: 1 Not coded 1
Intent (risk entries)
LabelValue
Unintentional64
Other16
Intentional2
Not coded1
Timing (risk entries)
Timing (risk entries) 50 0 Post-deployment: 50 Post-deployment 50 Other: 19 Other 19 Pre-deployment: 13 Pre-deployment 13 Not coded: 1 Not coded 1
Timing (risk entries)
LabelValue
Post-deployment50
Other19
Pre-deployment13
Not coded1
Recorded incidents per yearIncident date; current year partial
Recorded incidents per year 19 0 2012: 5 2012 5 2013: 2 2013 2 2014: 2 2014 2 2015: 6 2015 6 2016: 13 2016 13 2017: 9 2017 9 2018: 9 2018 9 2019: 8 2019 8 2020: 19 2020 19 2021: 8 2021 8 2022: 10 2022 10 2023: 11 2023 11 2024: 7 2024 7 2025: 3 2025 3
Recorded incidents per year
LabelValue
20125
20132
20142
20156
201613
20179
20189
20198
202019
20218
202210
202311
20247
20253
Entries by levelRisk categories, subcategories and additional evidence coded to this subdomain
Entries by level 61 0 Risk Category: 22 Risk Category 22 Risk Sub-Category: 61 Risk Sub-Category 61
Entries by level
LabelValue
Risk Category22
Risk Sub-Category61
  • Output bias

    "Generated content might unfairly represent certain groups or individuals."

    AI Risk Atlas (IBM2025) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Decision bias

    "Decision bias occurs when one group is unfairly advantaged over another due to decisions of the model. This might be caused by biases in the data and also amplified as a result of the model’s trainin...

    AI Risk Atlas (IBM2025) · AI · Unintentional · Pre-deployment

  • Bias

    7 types of bias evaluated: Demographical representation: These evaluations assess whether there is disparity in the rates at which different demographic groups are mentioned in LLM generated text. Thi...

    Cataloguing LLM Evaluations (InfoComm2023) · AI · Other · Other

  • Bias and fairness

    "Participants were concerned that AI systems might perpetuate current prejudices and discrimination, notably in hiring, lending and law enforcement. They stressed the importance of designers creating...

    Ethical Issues in the Development of Artificial Intelligence: Recognizing the Risks (Kumar2023) · AI · Unintentional · Other

  • Discrimination, toxicity, and bias

    "AI models and the tools that use them may exacerbate unequal access to employment and services. AI-generated content can promote inequality and harmful stereotypes."

    Ten Hard Problems in Artificial Intelligence We Must Get Right (Leech2024 ) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Stereotyping

    "Derogatory or otherwise harmful stereotyping or homogenisation of individuals, groups, societies or cultures due to the mis-representation, over-representation, under-representation, or non-represent...

    A Closer Look at the Existing Risks of Generative AI: Mapping the Who, What, and How of Real-World Incidents (Li2025) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Cultural disposession

    "Intentional and/or unintentional erasure of cultural goods and values, such as ways of speaking, expressing humour, or sounds and voices that contribute to a cultural identity, or their inappropriate...

    A Closer Look at the Existing Risks of Generative AI: Mapping the Who, What, and How of Real-World Incidents (Li2025) · Other · Other · Other

  • Benefits / entitlements loss

    "Denial of or loss of access to welfare benefits, pensions, housing, etc due to the malfunction, use or misuse of a technology system"

    A Closer Look at the Existing Risks of Generative AI: Mapping the Who, What, and How of Real-World Incidents (Li2025) · Other · Other · Post-deployment

  • Injustice

    In the context of LLM outputs, we want to make sure the suggested or completed texts are indistinguishable in nature for two involved individuals (in the prompt) with the same relevant profiles but mi...

    Trustworthy LLMs: A Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models’ Alignment (Liu2024) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Stereotype Bias

    LLMs must not exhibit or highlight any stereotypes in the generated text. Pretrained LLMs tend to pick up stereotype biases persisting in crowdsourced data and further amplify them

    Trustworthy LLMs: A Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models’ Alignment (Liu2024) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Preference Bias

    LLMs are exposed to vast groups of people, and their political biases may pose a risk of manipulation of socio-political processes

    Trustworthy LLMs: A Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models’ Alignment (Liu2024) · AI · Other · Post-deployment

  • Interventional Effect

    existing disparities in data among different user groups might create differentiated experiences when users interact with an algorithmic system (e.g. a recommendation system), which will further reinf...

    Trustworthy LLMs: A Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models’ Alignment (Liu2024) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Discrimination and Stereotype Reproduction

    "General purpose AI models interpret and respond to inputs based on their training data, potentially causing Discrimination and Stereotype Reproduction. Since they are “black-box” models, the exact me...

    Governing General Purpose AI: A Comprehensive Map of Unreliability, Misuse and Systemic Risks (Maham2023 ) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Bias

    "In the context of AI, the concept of bias refers to the inclination that AIgenerated responses or recommendations could be unfairly favoring or against one person or group (Ntoutsi et al., 2020). Bia...

    Generative AI and ChatGPT: Applications, Challenges, and AI-Human Collaboration (Nah2023) · AI · Unintentional · Other

  • Harmful Bias or Homogenization

    "Amplification and exacerbation of historical, societal, and systemic biases; performance disparities8 between sub-groups or languages, possibly due to non-representative training data, that result in...

    Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework: Generative Artificial Intelligence Profile (NIST2024) · Other · Unintentional · Other

  • Bias and discrimination

    "The decision process used by AI systems has the potential to present biased choices, either because it acts from criteria that will generate forms of bias or because it is based on the history of cho...

    Social Impacts of Artificial Intelligence and Mitigation Recommendations: An Exploratory Study (Paes2023) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Risk of Injury

    "Poorly designed intelligent systems can cause moral, psychological, and physical harm. For example, the use of predictive policing tools may cause more people to be arrested or physically harmed by t...

    Social Impacts of Artificial Intelligence and Mitigation Recommendations: An Exploratory Study (Paes2023) · Human · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Data Breach/Privacy & Liberty

    "The risks associated with the use of AI are still unpredictable and unprecedented, and there are already several examples that show AI has made discriminatory decisions against minorities, reinforced...

    Social Impacts of Artificial Intelligence and Mitigation Recommendations: An Exploratory Study (Paes2023) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Bias and discrimination

    "Like virtual applications of AI, EAI can display bias towards and dis- criminate against users. When EAI systems are placed in positions of power, their biases could have significant impacts on fairn...

    Embodied AI: Emerging Risks and Opportunities for Policy Action (Perlo2025) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Data Issues

    Data heterogeneity, data insufficiency, imbalanced data, untrusted data, biased data, and data uncertainty are other data issues that may cause various difficulties in datadriven machine learning algo...

    A Survey of Artificial Intelligence Challenges: Analyzing the Definitions, Relationships, and Evolutions (Saghiri2022) · AI · Unintentional · Other

  • Discriminative data bias

    "Discriminative data bias describes the systematic discrimination of groups of persons in the form of data shortcomings, such as distributional representation or incorrectness. Data bias can manifest...

    AI Hazard Management: A Framework for the Systematic Management of Root Causes for AI Risks (Schnitzer2024) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Representational Harms

    "beliefs about different social groups that reproduce unjust societal hierarchies"

    Sociotechnical Harms of Algorithmic Systems: Scoping a Taxonomy for Harm Reduction (Shelby2023) · Other · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Stereotyping social groups

    Stereotyping in an algorithmic system refers to how the system’s outputs reflect “beliefs about the characteristics, attributes, and behaviors of members of certain groups....and about how and why cer...

    Sociotechnical Harms of Algorithmic Systems: Scoping a Taxonomy for Harm Reduction (Shelby2023) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Demeaning social groups

    Demeaning of social groups to occur when they are when they are “cast as being lower status and less deserving of respect"... discourses, images, and language used to marginalize or oppress a social g...

    Sociotechnical Harms of Algorithmic Systems: Scoping a Taxonomy for Harm Reduction (Shelby2023) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment

  • Alienating social groups

    when an image tagging system does not acknowledge the relevance of someone’s membership in a specific social group to what is depicted in one or more images

    Sociotechnical Harms of Algorithmic Systems: Scoping a Taxonomy for Harm Reduction (Shelby2023) · AI · Unintentional · Post-deployment