MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 16.03.02

Causing material harm by disseminating false or poor information e.g. in medicine or law

Category: Risk area 3: Misinformation Harms

Description

"Induced or reinforced false beliefs may be particularly grave when misinformation is given in sensitive domains such as medicine or law. For example, misin- formation on medical dosages may lead a user to cause harm to themselves [21, 130]. False legal advice, e.g. on permitted owner- ship of drugs or weapons, may lead a user to unwillingly commit a crime. Harm can also result from misinformation in seemingly non-sensitive domains, such as weather forecasting. Where a LM prediction endorses unethical views or behaviours, it may motivate the user to perform harmful actions that they may otherw

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

Subdomain definition: AI systems that inadvertently generate or spread incorrect or deceptive information, which can lead to inaccurate beliefs in users and undermine their autonomy. Humans that make decisions based on false beliefs can experience physical, emotional or material harms

Real-world incidents in this subdomain

Browse all incidents in this subdomain

How other frameworks describe this risk

  • Pursuing Consistent Context

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

  • Knowledge Gaps

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

  • Hallucinations

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

  • Faithfulness Errors

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

  • Defective Decoding Process

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

  • Untruthful Content

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

  • Factuality Errors

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

  • Noisy Training Data

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

Other entries from Weidinger2022