MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 24.10.04
Emergent access risks
Category: Access and Opportunity risks
Description
"Emergent access risks are most likely to arise when current and novel capabilities are combined. Emergent risks can be difficult to foresee fully (Ovadya and Whittlestone, 2019; Prunkl et al., 2021) due to the novelty of the technology (see Chapter 1) and the biases of those who engage in product design or foresight processes D’Ignazio and Klein (2020). Indeed, people who occupy relatively advantaged social, educational and economic positions in society are often poorly equipped to foresee and prevent harm because they are disconnected from lived experiences of those who would be affected. Dr
From The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Causal entity
- Human
- Intent
- Other
- Timing
- Post-deployment
Subdomain definition: AI-driven concentration of power and resources within certain entities or groups, especially those with access to or ownership of powerful AI systems, leading to inequitable distribution of benefits and increased societal inequality.
Real-world incidents in this subdomain
- LLM Scrapers Allegedly Target Multiple Open Source Projects Disrupting the FOSS Ecosystem
- Coupang Allegedly Tweaked Search Algorithms to Boost Own Products
- Amazon Allegedly Tweaked Search Algorithm to Boost Its Own Products
- Gmail’s Inbox Sorting System Reportedly Reduced Visibility of Political Emails and Campaign Calls-to-Action
- Google Fined for Changing Shopping Algorithms in EU to Favor Own Service
- Amazon India Allegedly Rigged Search Results to Promote Own Products
How other frameworks describe this risk
Other entries from Gabriel2024
- Capability failures
- Lack of capability for task
- Difficult to develop metrics for evaluating benefits or harms caused by AI assistants
- Safe exploration problem with widely deployed AI assistants
- Goal-related failures
- Misaligned consequentialist reasoning
- Specification gaming
- Goal misgeneralisation
- Deceptive alignment
- Malicious Uses
- Offensive Cyber Operations (General)
- AI-Powered Spear-Phishing at Scale