Deepfakes and profiling: charting AI controversies

Is the much-publicized uproar over the dangers of AI tech overblown? Or are these fears on the nose?

According to one objective measure, AI certainly has been stirring up a hornet’s nest recently. The AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Incidents and Controversies (AIAAIC) Repository measures – unsurprisingly – contentious issues surrounding the tech, and as the graphic shows, these have dramatically increased.

The graphic was created for the 2023 AI Index Report by Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. It shows that there were 26x more reported incidents in 2021 than in 2012, a dramatic surge that researchers attributed to a number of factors.

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First of all, increased reporting of controversial incidents indicates just how much more prevalent AI has become in our lives. It also shows that since more attention is being paid to ethics around AI and automation nowadays, previous incidents may have gone unreported.

What qualifies as a controversy varies widely. The report cites examples such as a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky telling his troops to surrender and a British police initiative to rank the risk potential of street gang members using AI.

Interestingly, the launch of image generators such as Midjourney and DALL-E 2 also counted as controversies in the database. Concerns ranged from intellectual property implications to privacy-related matters such as whether AI companies have the rights to the images used in training generative AI tools.