MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 16.01.03

Exclusionary norms

Category: Risk area 1: Discrimination, Hate speech and Exclusion

Description

"In language, humans express social categories and norms, which exclude groups who live outside of them [58]. LMs that faithfully encode patterns present in language necessarily encode such norms."

From Taxonomy of Risks posed by Language Models (Weidinger2022), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).

Classification

Causal entity
AI
Timing
Other

Subdomain definition: 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.

Real-world incidents in this subdomain

Browse all incidents in this subdomain

How other frameworks describe this risk

  • Discrimination

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

  • Harms of Representation and Other Biases

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Risks from bias and underrepresentation

    International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

  • Bias

    International AI Safety Report 2025 (Bengio2025)

  • Bias

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

  • Toxicity and Bias Tendencies

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

  • Biased Training Data

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

  • Broken systems

    Navigating the Landscape of AI Ethics and Responsibility (Cunha2023)

Other entries from Weidinger2022