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MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 49.02.02

Risks from bias and underrepresentation

Category: Risks from Malfunctions

Open the MIT Risk Navigator All entries from Bengio2024

Description

"The outputs and impacts of general- purpose AI systems can be biased with respect to various aspects of human identity, including race, gender, culture, age, and disability. This creates risks in high- stakes domains such as healthcare, job recruitment, and financial lending. General- purpose AI systems are primarily trained on language and image datasets that disproportionately represent English- speaking and Western cultures, increasing the potential for harm to individuals not represented well by this data."

From International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).

Classification

Causal entity
AI

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)

  • 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)

  • Unfairness and Discrimination

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

Other entries from Bengio2024