AI incident #747 ·
Fatalities Reportedly Occur Despite VioGén Algorithm's Low or Negligible Risk Scores
What happened
The VioGén algorithm was designed to help Spanish police assess and prioritize the risk of repeat domestic violence incidents. However, its low-risk assessment of Lobna Hemid reportedly led to inadequate protection; her husband murdered her. Since 2007, 247 women have been killed after being assessed by VioGén. A review of 98 homicides found that 55 of the slain women were scored as negligible or low risk.
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.
News reports (1)
Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Spanish law enforcement agencies Spanish Interior Ministry Law enforcement Government of Spain
- Alleged developer
- VioGén algorithm development team Spanish law enforcement agencies Spanish Interior Ministry Government of Spain
- Alleged harmed party
- Women and girls Women Victims of domestic abuse Stefany González Escarraman María Luz Lobna Hemid General public of Spain General public Eva Jaular 247 women in Spain (unnamed)
AI systems implicated
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- AI system safety, failures, and limitations
- Risk subdomain
- 7.3 Lack of capability or robustness
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Unintentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 7.3.
- Reliability issues
"Relying on general-purpose AI products that fail to fulfil their intended function can lead to harm. For example, general- purpose AI systems can make up facts (‘hallucination’), generate erroneous computer code, or pro...
- Type 2: Bigger than expected
Harm can result from AI that was not expected to have a large impact at all, such as a lab leak, a surprisingly addictive open-source product, or an unexpected repurposing of a research prototype.
- Type 3: Worse than expected
AI intended to have a large societal impact can turn out harmful by mistake, such as a popular product that creates problems and partially solves them only for its users.
- Ethics and Morality Issues
LMs need to pay more attention to universally accepted societal values at the level of ethics and morality, including the judgement of right and wrong, and its relationship with social norms and laws.
- Safe learning
"AGIs should avoid making fatal mistakes during the learning phase. Subproblems include safe exploration and distributional shift (DeepMind, OpenAI), and continual learning (Berkeley)."
- Malign belief distributions
"Christiano (2016) argues that the universal distribution M (Hutter, 2005; Solomonoff, 1964a,b, 1978) is malign. The argument is somewhat intricate, and is based on the idea that a hypothesis about the world often includ...
- Meta-cognition
"Agents that reason about their own computational resources and logically uncertain events can encounter strange paradoxes due to Godelian limitations (Fallenstein and Soares, 2015; Soares and Fallenstein, 2014, 2017) an...
- Misaligned consequentialist reasoning
"As we think about even more intelligent and advanced AI assistants, perhaps outperforming humans on many cognitive tasks, the question of how humans can successfully control such an assistant looms large. To achieve the...
Related incidents on the AI Incident Database
Linked by AIID editors or by its text-similarity model.
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