Description: YouTube’s recommendation system and its focus on views and watched time were alleged by an advocacy group to have driven people towards climate denial and misinformation videos.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: YouTube developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed YouTube users and YouTube climate-skeptic users.
Incident Stats
Risk Subdomain
A further 23 subdomains create an accessible and understandable classification of hazards and harms associated with AI
3.1. False or misleading information
Risk Domain
The Domain Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies risks into seven AI risk domains: (1) Discrimination & toxicity, (2) Privacy & security, (3) Misinformation, (4) Malicious actors & misuse, (5) Human-computer interaction, (6) Socioeconomic & environmental harms, and (7) AI system safety, failures & limitations.
- Misinformation
Entity
Which, if any, entity is presented as the main cause of the risk
AI
Timing
The stage in the AI lifecycle at which the risk is presented as occurring
Post-deployment
Intent
Whether the risk is presented as occurring as an expected or unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Unintentional
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
Executive Summary
YouTube’s tremendous reach - and control over the content on its site - is unprecedented in media history. People around the globe spend a billion hours on YouTube every day, and the platform has two billion monthly active…
A report this month by the activist group Avaaz alleges YouTube is "driving millions of people to watch climate misinformation" daily.
What they found: One finding is that when users search for "global warming," 16% of the top 100 "related …
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
