MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 24.04.04

Sociocultural and Political Harms

Category: AI Influence

Open the MIT Risk Navigator All entries from Gabriel2024

Description

"These harms interfere with the peaceful organisation of social life, including in the cultural and political spheres. AI assistants may cause or contribute to friction in human relationships either directly, through convincing a user to end certain valuable relationships, or indirectly due to a loss of interpersonal trust due to an increased dependency on assistants. At the societal level, the spread of misinformation by AI assistants could lead to erasure of collective cultural knowledge. In the political domain, more advanced AI assistants could potentially manipulate voters by prompting th

From The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).

Classification

Domain: 5. Human-Computer Interaction
Subdomain: 5.2 Loss of human agency and autonomy
Causal entity: AI
Intent: Other
Timing: Post-deployment

Subdomain definition: Humans delegating key decisions to AI systems, or AI systems making decisions that diminish human control and autonomy, potentially leading to humans feeling disempowered, losing the ability to shape a fulfilling life trajectory or becoming cognitively enfeebled.

Real-world incidents in this subdomain

Browse all incidents in this subdomain

How other frameworks describe this risk

Autonomy
A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)
Autonomy/agency loss
A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)
Personality rights loss
A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)
Gradual loss of control
Dimensional Characterization and Pathway Modeling for Catastrophic AI Risks (Chin2025)
AI enables automation of military decision-making
A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values (Clarke2023)
AI-induced strategic instability
A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values (Clarke2023)
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Capabilities and Risks from Frontier AI (DSIT2023)
Humans might increasingly hand over control to misaligned AI systems
Capabilities and Risks from Frontier AI (DSIT2023)

Other entries from Gabriel2024

Capability failures Risk Category · 7.3
Lack of capability for task Risk Sub-Category · 7.3
Difficult to develop metrics for evaluating benefits or harms caused by AI assistants Risk Sub-Category · 6.5
Safe exploration problem with widely deployed AI assistants Risk Sub-Category · 7.3
Goal-related failures Risk Category · 7.1
Misaligned consequentialist reasoning Risk Sub-Category · 7.3
Specification gaming Risk Sub-Category · 7.1
Goal misgeneralisation Risk Sub-Category · 7.1
Deceptive alignment Risk Sub-Category · 7.1
Malicious Uses Risk Category · 4.0
Offensive Cyber Operations (General) Risk Sub-Category · 4.2
AI-Powered Spear-Phishing at Scale Risk Sub-Category · 4.1