How is AI harming us?

The AI Incident Tracker project classifies over 1200 real-world, reported incidents by risk domain, causal factors, and harm caused.

What is the AI Incident Tracker?

AI incidents are on the rise, yet current databases struggle with inconsistent structure, limiting their utility for policymaking. The AI Incident Tracker project addresses this by creating a tool to classify AI incidents based on risks and harm severity. Using a Large Language Model (LLM), the tool processes raw reports from the AI Incident Database and categorizes them using established frameworks, such as the MIT Risk Repository and a harm severity rating system based on CSET’s AI Harm Taxonomy.

This project, led by Simon Mylius, provides a proof-of-concept analysis of reported AI incidents, including preliminary insights into trends in the available data.

You can explore the AI Incident Tracker using interactive visualizations, including data categorized using MIT Risk Taxonomies, changes in incidents over time, the severity of harm associated with incidents, and more.  

The AI Incident Tracker is part of the MIT AI Risk Initiative, which aims to increase awareness and adoption of best practice AI risk management across the AI ecosystem.

How are AI Incidents changing over time?

This interactive visualization shows how incidents of harm from AI reported in the AI Incident Database are increasing over time, with the greatest increase in incidents associated with the Misinformation and Malicious Actors domains from the MIT AI Risk Repository. In the sections below, you can explore the incidents in more detail, for instance to see the growth in specific incidents related to particular risks or levels of harm.

Explore the AI Incident Tracker Project

You can explore different views of the database and classification in the project. For example, you can see all AI incidents classified using taxonomies from the MIT Risk Repository, the type of harm, and individual records in the AI Incident Database.

Key visualizations include bar charts and pie charts that display incident counts, proportions across domains (e.g., "System Failures," "Discrimination & Toxicity"), and trends in causal attributes. Additionally, insights highlight patterns such as the prevalence of system safety issues, intentional misuse trends, and incomplete reporting gaps.

Click through the links below to explore each of the interactive dashboards.

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What can I use the AI Incident Tracker for?

Limitations of the analysis and dataset

This classification database is intended to explore the potential capabilities and limitations of a scalable incident analysis framework. The classification analysis uses reports from the AI Incident Database (AIID) as input data which rely on submissions from the public and subject matter experts. The quality, reliability and depth of detail in the reports varies across the dataset. As the reporting is voluntary, the dataset is inevitably subject to some degree of sampling bias. Spot-checks have been used to provide feedback on misclassifications and to iterate the tool, improving its reliability, however a systematic validation study has not yet been completed.

Therefore patterns and trends observed in the data should be taken as indicative and validated through further analysis. 

Future Work

This work proves the concept of a scalable incident classification tool and paves the way for future work to explore its usefulness, validity, limitations and potential, which will be focused around the following activities:

  • User-stories - continue collecting user-stories to refine the tool in order to make it as relevant and useful as possible.
  • Validation study - compare a sample of incident classifications with human analysis to understand the validity and reliability of the model outputs.
  • Iterate methodology to improve validity - once a target sample of human classifications is available, the process can be updated and outputs evaluated in order to incorporate changes that improve validity,
  • Incorporate Root Cause Analysis - the analysis lends itself to working alongside root cause analysis such as Ishikawa (identification of potential contributing causes) and Fault Tree Analysis (deductive analysis of how contributing causes interact in conjunctive/disjunctive combination)
  • Adapt for other datasets of incident databases - the process could be applied to new datasets of reports to provide additional learning from a wider sample
  • Explore further insights from the analysis - what real-world policy decisions could insights from this analysis inform?
  • Link to safety cases and risk assessments - explore how the output of this type of analysis could be used as evidence to update risk assessments or safety cases  
  • Lessons learned for new incident monitoring processes. For example, are there commonalities in missing pieces of information in incident reports, or where analyses have low confidence scores?

The code repository will be made available as open-source to encourage users to evaluate and contribute improvements.

Please feel free to share feedback using this form - this will shape the direction of the work and help to make the tool as useful and relevant as possible.

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