Course / I. Foundations / 1.3
AI risks and harms
12 min read
NIST and the IAPP group AI harms by who is harmed. Use this to read scenarios quickly.
| Harmed party | Examples |
|---|---|
| Individuals | Discrimination; loss of privacy; physical or psychological harm; loss of autonomy or manipulation; wrongful denial of jobs, credit, housing, healthcare or benefits |
| Groups and society | Systemic bias against protected groups; disinformation and deepfakes; harm to democratic processes; labor displacement; environmental cost of compute |
| Organizations | Legal and regulatory penalties; reputational damage; financial loss; IP and trade-secret leakage; security breaches |
| Ecosystems | Concentration of power in a few model providers; supply-chain dependency; harm to financial or information systems |
AI-specific security threats
- Data poisoning: corrupting training data to change model behavior.
- Evasion / adversarial examples: crafted inputs that fool a model (a sticker that makes a stop sign read as a speed sign).
- Model inversion: reconstructing training data from outputs.
- Membership inference: learning whether a specific record was in the training set.
- Model theft / extraction: copying a model by querying it.
- Prompt injection and jailbreaks: instructions hidden in input that hijack a generative system.
Generative AI adds
Hallucination (confident false output), copyright and IP questions about training data and outputs, leakage of confidential data entered into prompts, synthetic media and impersonation, and harmful content generation.
Risk is likelihood × severity, in context
Governance prioritizes by how likely a harm is and how severe, broad and reversible it would be. A wrong movie recommendation and a wrong cancer diagnosis are both "errors"; only one demands heavy controls.
Check your understanding
Check 1 of 2Domain I. Foundations
An attacker slips mislabeled images into a dataset so the trained model misclassifies a specific product. This is:
Check 2 of 2Domain I. Foundations
Which is primarily a harm to society rather than to one individual?
Answer the checks, then mark this lesson complete
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