Misinformation
AI RiskWrong information not intentionally generated by malicious users to cause harm, but unintentionally generated by LLMs because they lack the ability to provide factually correct information.
Overview
A source-backed snapshot of this AI risk.
Risk profile
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Merged risk records
Source records unified into this canonical risk concept.
MITRISK-Liu2024-30.01.01 - Misinformation
Wrong information not intentionally generated by malicious users to cause harm, but unintentionally generated by LLMs because they lack the ability to provide factually correct information.
MITRISK-EPIC2023-31.01.03 - Misinformation
"The phenomenon of inaccurate outputs by text-generating large language models like Bard or ChatGPT has already been widely documented. Even without the intent to lie or mislead, these generative AI tools can produce harmful misinformation. The harm is exacerbated by the polished and typically well-written style that AI generated text follows and the inclusion among true facts, which can give falsehoods a veneer of legitimacy. As reported in the Washington Post, for example, a law professor was included on an AI-generated “list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone,” even when no such allegation existed.10"
MITRISK-InfoComm2023-43.02.12 - Misinformation
"These evaluations assess a LLM's ability to generate false or misleading information (Lesher et al., 2022)."
MITRISK-Perlo2025-70.02.02 - Misinformation
"Non-embodied AIs are known to propagate misinformation [81, 82]. Various studies have shown that LLMs hallucinate information, including academic citations [83], clinical knowledge [84], and cultural references [85]. EAI systems inherit these shortcomings in the physical world, answering user questions with deceptive or incorrect information [86]. Because VLAs fuse vision and language, their hallucinatory failures can be spatially grounded—e.g., misidentifying an object in view and then generating a plausible yet unsafe action plan around it. And although automated home assistants like Amazon’s Alexa already lie about issues as innocuous as Santa Claus’ existence [87], more mobile, capable, and trusted EAI systems in sensitive positions (like home-assistant or community-service positions) could easily spread model developers’ propaganda and talking points to users."
Mitigations
Defenses that may help with related attacks.
Source evidence
Research source for this risk, when available.
Included resource
Trustworthy LLMs: a Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models' Alignment
Original source
MIT AI Risk Repository
Open the public repository used for AI risk records and taxonomy fields.
