The AI Incident Database

The Discover app of the AI Incident Database

The Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society (PAI) is an international coalition of organizations with the mision “to shape best practices, research, and public dialogue about AI’s benefits for people and society.” Its 100+ member organizations cover a broad range of interests and include leading AI research labs (DeepMind, OpenAI); several universities (MIT, Cornell); most big tech companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft); news media (NYT, BBC); and humanitarian organizations (Unicef, ACLU).

PAI recently launched a new project: the AI Incident Database . The AIID mimics the FAA’s airplane accidents database and is similarly meant to help “future researchers and developers avoid repeated bad outcomes.” It’s launching with a set of 93 incidents, including an autonomous car that killed a pedestrian, a trading algorithm that caused a flash crash, and a facial recognition system that caused an innocent person to be arrested (see DT #43). For each incident, the database includes a set of news articles that reported about it: there are over 1,000 reports in the AIID so far. It’s also open source on GitHub, at PartnershipOnAI/aiid.

Systems like this (and Amsterdam’s AI registry, for example) are a clear sign that productized AI is a quickly starting to mature as a field, and that lots of good work is being done to manage its impact. Most importantly, I hope these projects will help us have more sensible discussions about regulating AI. Benedict Evans’ essays Notes on AI Bias and Face recognition and AI ethics are excellent reads on this; he compares calls to “regulate AI” to wanting to regulate databases — it’s not the right level of abstraction, and we should be thinking about specific policies to address specific problems instead. A dataset of categorized AI incidents, managed by a broad coalition of organizations, sounds like a great step in this direction.