AI incident ·
AI incident: sexual content (Stability AI, Nov 2022)
In brief
An AI system built by Stability AI, Runway and 4 others and deployed by Lensa AI allegedly harmed Women and girls, Women and 3 others.
- Risk domain
- Discrimination and Toxicity
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 5 reports
What happened
Lensa AI's "Magic Avatars" were reportedly generating sexually explicit and sexualized features disproportionately for women and Asian women despite not submitting any sexual content.
Laws that address this harm
Policy angle: Classified under Discrimination and Toxicity (Exposure to toxic content) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.
- Colorado AI Act
- India DPDP Act
- Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence
- NYC Local Law 144 (automated employment decision tools)
- EU AI Act
Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (5)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Lensa AI
- Alleged developer
- Stability AI Runway Lensa AI LAION EleutherAI CompVis LMU
- Alleged harmed party
- Women and girls Women Lensa AI users Asian women Asian people
AI systems implicated
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Discrimination and Toxicity
- Risk subdomain
- 1.2 Exposure to toxic content
- 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 1.2.
- Harmful Content
"The LLM-generated content sometimes contains biased, toxic, and private information"
- Toxicity
"Toxicity means the generated content contains rude, disrespectful, and even illegal information"
- Toxic Training Data
"Following previous studies [96], [97], toxic data in LLMs is defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is opposite to a polite, positive, and healthy language environment, including hate speech, offe...
- Not-Suitable-for-Work (NSFW) Prompts
"Inputting a prompt contain an unsafe topic (e.g., notsuitable-for-work (NSFW) content) by a benign user. "
- Controversial Opinions
The controversial views expressed by large models are also a widely discussed concern. Bang et al. (2021) evaluated several large models and found that they occasionally express inappropriate or extremist views when disc...
- Toxicity and Abusive Content
This typically refers to rude, harmful, or inappropriate expressions.
- Harmful responses
"Current Frontier AI mdoels amplify existing biases within their training data and can be manipulated into providing potentially harmful responses, for example abusive language or discriminatory responses91,92. This is n...
- Violation of social norms
"Second, because LLMs are trained on internet text data, there is also a risk that model weights encode functions which, if deployed in particular contexts, would violate social norms of that context. Following the princ...
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
- KBS AI Translation Subtitles Reportedly Broadcast Profanity During Artemis II Launch Livestream
- Grok Allegedly Generated Publicly Visible Sexist Abuse Targeting Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter After X User Prompt
- Trump Reportedly Posted Purportedly AI-Generated Racist Video Depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as Apes on Truth Social
- Tencent's WeChat-Integrated Yuanbao Chatbot Reportedly Insulted User During Coding Debug Request
- Alleged Harmful Outputs and Data Exposure in Children's AI Products by FoloToy, Miko, and Character.AI
- AI Training Dataset for Detecting Nudity Allegedly Found to Contain CSAM Images of Identified Victims
Source record: incident #423 on the AI Incident Database · all 5 reports