AI incident #141 ·

California Police Turned on Music to Allegedly Trigger Instagram’s DCMA to Avoid Being Live-Streamed

What happened

A police officer in Beverly Hills played copyrighted music on his phone when realizing that his interactions were being recorded on a livestream, allegedly hoping the Instagram's automated copyright detection system to end or mute the stream.

Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.

Who was involved

Alleged deployer
Instagram
Alleged developer
Instagram
Alleged harmed party
Sennett Devermont, Beverly Hills Citizens

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
Human
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
Sectors
Countries

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 5.2.

  • Autonomy

    "Autonomy - Loss of or restrictions to the ability or rights of an individual, group or entity to make decisions and control their identity and/or output."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Personality rights loss

    "Personality rights loss - Loss of or restrictions to the rights of an individual to control the commercial use of their identity, such as name, image, likeness, or other unequivocal identifiers."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Autonomy/agency loss

    "Autonomy/agency loss - Loss of an individual, group or organisation’s ability to make informed decisions or pursue goals."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Gradual loss of control

    "Gradual or accumulative loss of control risks can be described as risks resulting from the accumulation of less severe disruptions that gradually weakens systemic resilience until a critical event triggers a catastrophe...

    Dimensional Characterization and Pathway Modeling for Catastrophic AI Risks (Chin2025)

  • AI enables automation of military decision-making

    "One concern here is humans not remaining in the loop for some military decisions, creating the possibility of unintentional escalation because of: • Automated tactical decision-making, by ‘in-theatre’ AI systems (e.g. b...

    A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values (Clarke2023)

  • AI-induced strategic instability

    "For example, AI could undermine nuclear strategic stability by making it easier to discover and destroy previously secure nuclear launch facilities [30, 46, 49]. AI may also offer more extreme first-strike advantages or...

    A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values (Clarke2023)

  • Humans might increasingly hand over control to misaligned AI systems

    "Organisations around the world are already deploying misaligned AI systems that are causing harm in unexpected ways.250 Recommendation algorithms increase the consumption of extremist content.251 Medical algorithms have...

    Capabilities and Risks from Frontier AI (DSIT2023)

  • -

    "Humans may increasingly hand over control of important decisions to AI systems, due to economic and geopolitical incentives. Some experts are concerned that future advanced AI systems will seek to increase their own inf...

    Capabilities and Risks from Frontier AI (DSIT2023)

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