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Korean Chatbot Luda Reportedly Made Offensive Remarks Towards Minority Groups in South Korea

11 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Scatter Lab and Chatbot Developers and deployed by Facebook Messenger allegedly harmed Korean Facebook Messenger Users, People With Disabilities In South Korea and 7 others.

Risk domain
Discrimination and Toxicity Exposure to toxic content
Occurred
Coverage
11 reportsJan 2021 - Apr 2021

What happened

A Korean interactive chatbot was allegedly shown in screenshots to have used derogatory and bigoted language when asked about lesbians, Black people, and people with disabilities.

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 in South Korea.

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 (11)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. AI Chatbot Shut Down After Learning to Talk Like a Racist Asshole
    vice.com · Junhyup Kwon, Hyeong Yun
  2. Korea’s controversial AI chatbot Luda to be shut down temporarily
    pulsenews.co.kr · Pulse
  3. South Korean AI chatbot pulled from Facebook after hate speech towards minorities
    theguardian.com · Justin McCurry
  4. (News Focus) Chatbot Luda controversy leave questions over AI ethics, data collection
    en.yna.co.kr · Kim Eun-jung
  5. Chatbot shut down after saying it 'hates lesbians' and using racist slurs
    thenextweb.com · Thomas Macaulay
  6. Chatbot Gone Awry Starts Conversations About AI Ethics in South Korea
    thediplomat.com · Dongwoo Kim
  7. AI chatbot mired in legal dispute over data collection
    koreaherald.com · Shin Ji-hye
  8. Civic groups file petition over human rights violations by chatbot Luda
    koreaherald.com · Ock Hyun-ju
  9. AI Chatbot ‘Lee Luda’ and Data Ethics
    medium.com · Yeonsoo Doh
  10. A South Korean Chatbot Shows Just How Sloppy Tech Companies Can Be With User Data
    slate.com · Heesoo Jang
  11. (2nd LD) Developer of AI chatbot service fined for massive personal data breach
    en.yna.co.kr · Yonhap News Agency

Who was involved

Alleged deployer
Facebook Messenger
Alleged harmed party
Korean Facebook Messenger Users, People With Disabilities In South Korea, Gender Minorities In South Korea, Minorities, Minorities In Korea, Chatbot Users, Luda Users, General Public, General Public Of South Korea

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Unintentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
none
Sectors
information and communication, arts, entertainment and recreation
Countries
KR

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"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxicity

    "Toxicity means the generated content contains rude, disrespectful, and even illegal information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • 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...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Not-Suitable-for-Work (NSFW) Prompts

    "Inputting a prompt contain an unsafe topic (e.g., notsuitable-for-work (NSFW) content) by a benign user. "

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • 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...

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Toxicity and Abusive Content

    This typically refers to rude, harmful, or inappropriate expressions.

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • 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...

    Future Risks of Frontier AI (GOS2023)

  • 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...

    The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Source record: incident #106 on the AI Incident Database · all 11 reports