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AI Risk

Reifying essentialist categories

algorithmic systems that reify essentialist social categories can be understood as when systems that classify a person’s membership in a social group based on narrow, socially constructed criteria that reinforce perceptions of human difference as inherent, static and seemingly natural... especially likely when ML models or human raters classify a person’s attributes – for instance, their gender, race, or sexual or...

AI Risk1. Discrimination & Toxicity1.1 > Unfair discrimination and misrepresentation2 - Post-deployment

Record summary

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Techniques0Attack methods connected to this risk.
Mitigations0Defenses that may help with related attacks.
Domain1. Discrimination & ToxicityThe broad risk area this belongs to.

Risk profile

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algorithmic systems that reify essentialist social categories can be understood as when systems that classify a person’s membership in a social group based on narrow, socially constructed criteria that reinforce perceptions of human difference as inherent, static and seemingly natural... especially likely when ML models or human raters classify a person’s attributes – for instance, their gender, race, or sexual orientation – by making assumptions based on their physical appearance

Domain1. Discrimination & Toxicity
Subdomain1.1 > Unfair discrimination and misrepresentation
Entity2 - AI
Intent2 - Unintentional
Timing2 - Post-deployment
CategoryRepresentational Harms
SubcategoryReifying essentialist categories

Suggested mitigations

Defenses that may help with related attacks.

No propagated mitigations. No defense is available through the connected attack methods.

Source

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