Microsoft's AI system automatically generated an insensitive poll asking readers to speculate on the cause of a woman's death, which appeared alongside a Guardian news article about a murder victim on Microsoft's news aggregation platform.
Microsoft's news aggregation service, Microsoft Start, used AI to automatically generate a poll that appeared alongside a Guardian article about the death of Lilie James, a 21-year-old water polo coach found dead with serious head injuries at a school in Sydney, Australia. The AI-generated poll, labeled 'Insights from AI', asked readers 'What do you think is the reason behind the woman's death?' with three options: murder, accident, or suicide. Readers reacted angrily to the poll, with some blaming the Guardian journalists who had written the original article, not realizing Microsoft had created the poll. The Guardian's CEO Anna Bateson wrote to Microsoft president Brad Smith, stating the incident caused 'significant reputational damage' to the organization and was 'potentially distressing' for James's family. Microsoft subsequently removed the poll and deactivated all AI-generated polls for news articles, stating they were investigating the cause of the inappropriate content. The incident occurred despite Microsoft having a licensing agreement with the Guardian to republish their content, and the Guardian had previously requested that Microsoft not apply experimental AI technologies to their journalism without approval.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that inadvertently generate or spread incorrect or deceptive information, which can lead to inaccurate beliefs in users and undermine their autonomy. Humans that make decisions based on false beliefs can experience physical, emotional or material harms
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Unintentional
Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed