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NOPE

NOPE · AI and people

AI incidents

Reports of AI-related harm and adverse experiences affecting people’s safety, wellbeing, rights and livelihoods. Explore what happened and the evidence available.

NOPE’s core concern is when AI communicates with a person, acts on their behalf, or depicts or impersonates them. The tracker also records consequential decisions, claims and privacy harms involving AI. Each case needs a described connection between AI use and the harm, including private information recorded into or disclosed to an AI service. Each account is reviewed for publication; claims may remain uncorroborated or disputed. How we review and count cases

Explore incidents Our scope and evidence

In this selection

Published cases
2
Countries with reported events
1
Located 1 of 2 cases · 1 unknown
Languages in checked sources
1
Recorded for 2 of 2 cases
2Core concern
AI communicated, acted for, depicted or impersonated 1Contextual cases
AI made a decision or claim about someone

These figures describe the cases collected by NOPE. Coverage varies with discovery, reporting and available evidence. They do not estimate how often AI-related harm occurs.

0cases with a recorded lawsuit outcome 0cases with a recorded regulatory response 0cases involving minors

Response counts currently use each case’s principal recorded outcome. Further proceedings may be described in its account.

When events happened

0 cases without a known event year

Cases in this selection, counted once in their first known event year. A series may continue beyond that year. Reporting and collection dates are excluded. NOPE has searched recent events more thoroughly than earlier years, so bar heights also reflect collection effort.

1 20251 2026
Reported severity MediumLow
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2 of 1005 published cases

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17 Jul 2025United StatesMicrosoft Copilot (reported)

Madison newspaper reporter fired after story ran with invented quotes the paper blamed on unauthorized AI use; she says company-installed Copilot added them

On 13 July 2025 the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, Wisconsin, published on its front page a reporter's story about redevelopment proposals for a downtown block. It quoted the co-owner of a cafe that does not exist and described proposal features that the developer says were not in its proposal. The paper removed the story and on 17 July published a re-reported version with an editor's note saying the original contained incorrect information and quotes created by an unauthorized use of AI. The reporter, who had been with the paper for a couple of months, told Isthmus that she ran her finished draft through the AI program the company had installed on her work computer, Microsoft Copilot, which she believed was approved for checking copy, and that the AI-edited version contained the invented quote. She says she was fired by phone the day the re-reported story ran, without a formal investigation, and later lost her health insurance and has had little luck finding another job. She takes full responsibility for the errors and also points to rushed editing and the absence of an AI policy or training. The paper said it does not comment on personnel matters.

Core concern Medium reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 29/10/2026

May 2026Event location unknownChatGPT and Claude (reported)

Author of The Future of Truth acknowledges synthetic and misattributed quotes linked to his AI research tools; two people quoted say the quotes are not theirs

Ars Technica reported on 22 May 2026 that a New York Times investigation that week found what Steven Rosenbaum acknowledged are "a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes" in his book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, linked to his use of AI tools while researching it. Rosenbaum told Ars that ChatGPT and Claude were used heavily to gather information and that AI-sourced material was tagged in his notes and passed to a fact-checker and copy editors provided by the publisher. According to Ars, the Times identified six problematic citations among the book's 285 outside citations, including three synthetic quotes with no apparent source. Tech reporter Kara Swisher told the Times she never said a quote attributed to her, and professor Lisa Feldman Barrett said quotes attributed to Barrett do not appear in Barrett's book and are wrong. Rosenbaum said he was working with editors on a citation audit to correct future editions. WIRED later removed an excerpt from the book, saying it did not meet its editorial standards.

Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 18/10/2026

Cases may have several effects and sources. Mixed accounts qualify when they include a reported harm or adverse experience. People are counted within individual cases where sources support a number; we do not publish a collection-wide total of distinct people.

A source’s existence, the experience it reports and AI’s causal role are separate questions. A lawsuit records allegations unless a subsequent finding establishes them.

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Last dataset update: 29/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.