MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 24.11.05
Entrenching specific ideologies
Category: Misinformation risks
Description
"AI assistants may provide ideologically biased or otherwise partial information in attempting to align to user expectations. In doing so, AI assistants may reinforce people’s pre-existing biases and compromise productive political debate."
From The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Domain
- 3. Misinformation
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Unintentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
Subdomain definition: Highly personalized AI-generated misinformation creating “filter bubbles” where individuals only see what matches their existing beliefs, undermining shared reality, weakening social cohesion and political processes.
Real-world incidents in this subdomain
- Google Books Appears to Be Indexing Works Written by AI
- Uptick in Low-Quality AI-Produced Content Degraded Publishers' Submission Management
- Korean Politician Employed Deepfake as Campaign Representative
- Facebook Political Ad Delivery Algorithms Inferred Users' Political Alignment, Inhibiting Political Campaigns' Reach
How other frameworks describe this risk
- Institutional trust loss
- Radicalisation
- Information degradation
- Worsened epistemic processes for society
- Reduced decision-making capacity as a result of decreased trust in information
- Widespread use of persuasive tools contributes to splintered epistemic communities
- AI contributes to increased online polarisation
- Degradation of the information environment
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