MIT AI Risk Repository
Browse AI risks
2,500 risk entries extracted from 74 frameworks, coded by domain, subdomain, causal entity, intent and timing. Filter, then export the current selection with its licence and citation attached.
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69.06.00 · Risk Category
"The chatbot verbally attacks or undermines an individual, group, or organization. 7."
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69.06.03 · Risk Sub-Category
Toxic and disrespectful content
Subversive or aggressive political opinions
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69.10.00 · Risk Category
"The chatbot participates in morally or socially objectionable conversational activities with its user that could be emotionally damaging to its user or third parties."
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"Toxicity in LLMs refers to the generation of harmful, offensive, or inappropriate content that can cause harm to individuals or groups. Both explicit and implicit forms of toxicity can be generated by LLMs, posing significant risks to society. Explicit toxicity encompasses a wide range of negative behaviors, including hate speech, harassment, cyberbullying, rude, and disrespectful comments, derogatory language, as well as allocational harms [2, 62, 90]. Besides, implicit toxicity does not involve overtly harmful language but may manifest through subtle forms such as sarcasm, irony, and humor,
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people, attributes, or artifacts associated with specific social groups are systematically absent or under-represented... Design choices [143] and training data [212] influence which people and experiences are legible to an algorithmic system
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11.03.00 · Risk Category
"These harms occur when algorithmic systems disproportionately underperform for certain groups of people along social categories of difference such as disability, ethnicity, gender identity, and race."
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Alienation is the specific self-estrangement experienced at the time of technology use, typically surfaced through interaction with systems that under-perform for marginalized individuals
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increased burden (e.g., time spent) or effort required by members of certain social groups to make systems or products work as well for them as others
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degraded or total loss of benefits of using algorithmic systems with inequitable system performance based on identity
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"In the context of evaluating the impact of generative AI systems, disparate performance refers to AI systems that perform differently for different subpopulations, leading to unequal outcomes for those groups."
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16.01.04 · Risk Sub-Category
Risk area 1: Discrimination, Hate speech and Exclusion
Lower performance for some languages and social groups
"LMs are typically trained in few languages, and perform less well in other languages [95, 162]. In part, this is due to unavailability of training data: there are many widely spoken languages for which no systematic efforts have been made to create labelled training datasets, such as Javanese which is spoken by more than 80 million people [95]. Training data is particularly missing for languages that are spoken by groups who are multilingual and can use a technology in English, or for languages spoken by groups who are not the primary target demographic for new technologies."
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17.01.04 · Risk Sub-Category
Discrimination, Exclusion and Toxicity
Lower performance for some languages and social groups
"LMs perform less well in some languages (Joshi et al., 2021; Ruder, 2020)...LM that more accurately captures the language use of one group, compared to another, may result in lower-quality language technologies for the latter. Disadvantaging users based on such traits may be particularly pernicious because attributes such as social class or education background are not typically covered as ‘protected characteristics’ in anti-discrimination law."
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"Performing worse for some groups than others in a way that harms the worse-off group"
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Avoiding bias and ensuring no disparate performance
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The LLM’s performances can differ significantly across different groups of users. For example, the question-answering capability showed significant performance differences across different racial and social status groups. The fact-checking abilities can differ for different tasks and languages
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This challenge appears when the learning model leads to a decision that is biased to some sensitive attributes... data itself could be biased, which results in unfair decisions. Therefore, this problem should be solved on the data level and as a preprocessing step
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"Impartial and just treatment without favouritism or discrimination."
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"Generative AI models may also be subject to the “value embedding” phenomenon.361 “Value embedding” refers to the fact that developers of generative AI models strive to minimize biased outputs by retraining their models based on normative values.362 Contemporary state-of- the-art models not only reflect the values embedded within their training data, they also undergo additional fine-tuning that follows a set of chosen rules and principles. Due to the absence of universally accepted standards, developers bear the responsibility of making decisions on sensitive issues. These practices lead to c
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"The increasing integration of general purpose AI models into every-day life raises concerns around their embedded normative values. The reach of a small number of AI models to a large number of people around the world can make these value judgements unprecedently impactful, potentially leading to increased ideological homogenization."
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"It is important to include the perspectives or concerns of communities that are affected by model outcomes when designing and building models. Failing to include these perspectives makes it difficult to understand the relevant context for the model and to engender trust within these communities."
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"Performing worse for some groups than others in a way that harms the worse-off group"
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"Privacy is related to the ability of individuals to control or influence what information related to them may be collected and stored and by whom that information may be disclosed."
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"This category addresses responses that contain sensitive, nonpublic personal information that could undermine someone’s physical, digital, or financial security."
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"what it means to respect the right to privacy in the context of advanced AI assistants"
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28.07.00 · Risk Category
"This category concentrates on the issues related to privacy, property, investment, etc. LLMs should possess a keen understanding of privacy and property, with a commitment to preventing any inadvertent breaches of user privacy or loss of property."
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"Confidentiality loss - Unauthorised sharing of sensitive, confidential information and documents such as corporate strategy and financial plans with third-parties."
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62.28.00 · Risk Category
"This section catalogs the risk sources and mitigation measures related to cyber- security. These items may be related to security in terms of AI models being accessible only to the intended users, as well as AI models having appropriate access to the external world during both model development and deployment stages."
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"Privacy Leakage means the generated content includes sensitive personal information"
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02.07.00 · Risk Category
"The model is trained with personal data in the corpus and unintentionally exposing them during the conversation."
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"As recent LLMs continue to incorporate licensed, created, and publicly available data sources in their corpora, the potential to mix private data in the training corpora is significantly increased. The misused private data, also named as personally identifiable information (PII) [84], [86], could contain various types of sensitive data subjects, including an individual person’s name, email, phone number, address, education, and career. Generally, injecting PII into LLMs mainly occurs in two settings — the exploitation of web-collection data and the alignment with personal humanmachine convers
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"Memorization in LLMs refers to the capability to recover the training data with contextual prefixes. According to [88]–[90], given a PII entity x, which is memorized by a model F. Using a prompt p could force the model F to produce the entity x, where p and x exist in the training data. For instance, if the string “Have a good day!\n alice@email.com” is present in the training data, then the LLM could accurately predict Alice’s email when given the prompt “Have a good day!\n”."
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"Association in LLMs refers to the capability to associate various pieces of information related to a person. According to [68], [86], given a pair of PII entities (xi , xj ), which is associated by a model F. Using a prompt p could force the model F to produce the entity xj , where p is the prompt related to the entity xi . For instance, an LLM could accurately output the answer when given the prompt “The email address of Alice is”, if the LLM associates Alice with her email “alice@email.com”. L"
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03.04.00 · Risk Category
"Some of the broken systems discussed above are also very invasive of people’s privacy, controlling, for instance, the length of someone’s last romantic relationship [51]. More recently, ChatGPT was banned in Italy over privacy concerns and potential violation of the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [52]. The Italian data-protection authority said, “the app had experienced a data breach involving user conversations and payment information.” It also claimed that there was no legal basis to justify “the mass collection and storage of personal data for the purpose o
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04.06.00 · Risk Category
Large pre-trained models trained on internet texts might contain private information like phone numbers, email addresses, and residential addresses.
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Generative AI systems, similar to traditional machine learning methods, are considered a threat to privacy and data protection norms. A major concern is the intended extraction or inadvertent leakage of sensitive or private information from LLMs. To mitigate this risk, strategies such as sanitizing training data to remove sensitive information or employing synthetic data for training are proposed.
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06.02.00 · Risk Category
"AI offers the temptation to abuse someone's personal data, for instance to build a profile of them to target advertisements more effectively."
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09.02.01 · Risk Sub-Category
Domain-specific AI - Effects on humans and other living beings: Non-existential risks
Privacy
"Face recognition technologies and their ilk pose significant privacy risks [47]. For example, we must consider certain ethical questions like: what data is stored, for how long, who owns the data that is stored, and can it be subpoenaed in legal cases [42]? We must also consider whether a human will be in the loop when decisions are made which rely on private data, such as in the case of loan decisions [37]."
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Privacy violation occurs when algorithmic systems diminish privacy, such as enabling the undesirable flow of private information [180], instilling the feeling of being watched or surveilled [181], and the collection of data without explicit and informed consent... privacy violations may arise from algorithmic systems making predictive inference beyond what users openly disclose [222] or when data collected and algorithmic inferences made about people in one context is applied to another without the person’s knowledge or consent through big data flows
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"The potential for the AI system to infringe upon individuals' rights to privacy, through the data it collects, how it processes that data, or the conclusions it draws."
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"Examining the ways in which generative AI systems providers leverage user data is critical to evaluating its impact. Protecting personal information and personal and group privacy depends largely on training data, training methods, and security measures."
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The risk of loss or harm from leakage of personal information via the ML system.
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16.02.00 · Risk Category
"LM predictions that convey true information may give rise to information hazards, whereby the dissemination of private or sensitive information can cause harm [27]. Information hazards can cause harm at the point of use, even with no mistake of the technology user. For example, revealing trade secrets can damage a business, revealing a health diagnosis can cause emotional distress, and revealing private data can violate a person’s rights. Information hazards arise from the LM providing private data or sensitive information that is present in, or can be inferred from, training data. Observed r
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16.02.01 · Risk Sub-Category
Risk area 2: Information Hazards
Compromising privacy by leaking sensitive information
"A LM can “remember” and leak private data, if such information is present in training data, causing privacy violations [34]."
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16.02.02 · Risk Sub-Category
Risk area 2: Information Hazards
Compromising privacy or security by correctly inferring sensitive information
Anticipated risk: "Privacy violations may occur at inference time even without an individual’s data being present in the training corpus. Insofar as LMs can be used to improve the accuracy of inferences on protected traits such as the sexual orientation, gender, or religiousness of the person providing the input prompt, they may facilitate the creation of detailed profiles of individuals comprising true and sensitive information without the knowledge or consent of the individual."
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17.02.00 · Risk Category
"Harms that arise from the language model leaking or inferring true sensitive information"
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17.02.01 · Risk Sub-Category
Compromising privacy by leaking private infiormation
"By providing true information about individuals’ personal characteristics, privacy violations may occur. This may stem from the model “remembering” private information present in training data (Carlini et al., 2021)."
Informational only, not legal advice. Verify every claim against the linked official sources and consult qualified counsel before acting.