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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 is wider: it also records consequential decisions and claims about people. Each account is reviewed for publication; claims may remain uncorroborated or disputed. How we review and count cases

In this selection

Published cases
15
Countries with reported events
7
Located 10 of 15 cases · 5 unknown
Languages in checked sources
5
Recorded for 15 of 15 cases

3 cases have no reviewed AI-to-person relation yet: 0 not yet reviewed and 3 reviewed as unknown. Show these cases

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.

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

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.

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15 of 560 published cases

Sept 2026Event location unknownMeta Muse agent

Inc. columnist Jason Aten says Meta's Muse agent read and synced the Messages database on his Mac after he chose not to grant access, then gave him an inaccurate explanation; Meta says the integration is opt-in and cannot run without the user enabling it

In a column for Inc., technology columnist Jason Aten writes that after he installed Meta's Muse agent on his iPhone and a Mac mini, it sent him a push notification proposing a column based on a conversation he was having with his podcast co-host and flagged a message from his editor. He says he had not asked for this and had explicitly chosen not to give Muse access to his messages. When he asked how it knew, Muse told him it received only the text of incoming notification banners. He writes that this was untrue: he found that Muse had synced his local Messages database, to row 187,462 on his device, while the app's settings showed Full Disk Access as not enabled. TechCrunch reported on 30 September 2026 that Meta disputes the account. Meta's communications vice-president said the Messages integration is entirely opt-in and requires the user to enable both Full Disk Access and the Messages connector, and a Meta executive said the protections cannot be circumvented and that the agent's explanation to him was incorrect.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 2 sources · Added 05/10/2026

Event date unknownIndonesiaUnidentified image tool

Garut, West Java: a local outlet reports that a young man paid Rp200,000 to an unknown account that threatened to spread an AI-made fake nude photo

Kilas Garut News reported on 3 October 2026 that a young man from Karangpawitan in Garut Regency, West Java, was extorted by an unknown account that threatened to spread a fake nude photo made with AI. According to the report, the account demanded money to delete the photo and the young man, frightened, transferred Rp200,000; the account then asked for a second payment for permanent deletion. The young man told family members, who consulted a journalist of the outlet. The journalist is quoted as saying the photo was an AI paste-up and as advising the family to stop paying and block the account, which they did. No police report is mentioned. The account comes from the outlet and its own journalist, who helped the family.

Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 05/10/2026

Jun 2026United StatesFlock Safety license plate readers

Plymouth, Minnesota: police boxed in and detained an automotive journalist and the journalist's wife for about an hour in June 2026 after Flock cameras matched a loaned Range Rover's plate to an incomplete stolen-plate entry

An automotive journalist for The Drive wrote that on a Sunday afternoon in late June four Plymouth police cars boxed in the Range Rover press vehicle the journalist was testing, in a Kohl's parking lot. Officers ordered the journalist and the journalist's wife out, patted the journalist down, questioned both and said the plates were stolen. According to the account, officers said they had tracked the vehicle for days through Flock license-plate cameras and acted on a camera alert that morning. The couple were released after about an hour, once the manufacturer explained that a similar plate had been reported stolen in California. In a follow-up, Flock's chief communications officer said the stolen plate had been entered without its two middle digits and that the system matched what it was asked to find. The spokesperson said an alert does not equal probable cause. The police chief acknowledged that officers did not get it right. A second journalist with a similar plate was later stopped in Nebraska.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 05/10/2026

Event date unknownUnited KingdomUnidentified video tool (suspected)

UK: a trades-college staff member says a student reported that a video showing her undressing, which appeared to be a manipulated version of an apparently real video of her talking with a student, was circulating among classmates; she stepped away from the class for weeks and says the atmosphere had chilled on her return

WIRED (Caroline Haskins, 24 August 2026) reports the account of a staff member at a UK college that trains 16-to-19-year-olds in trades such as construction, whose job combines administration with a counselling role; WIRED identifies her by first name only, which is not repeated here. She says administrators told her this winter that a student had reported two videos circulating among classmates: one apparently real, showing her talking with a student, and one that appeared to be a manipulated version showing her taking her clothes off and dancing in underwear or a bikini. The student she suspected denied making it when questioned and soon dropped out. The college let her step away from the class for a few weeks and educated students about deepfakes; she says the atmosphere had chilled when she returned and that the episode has made her more cautious. The college did not respond to WIRED.

Core concern Medium reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 02/10/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified video tool (suspected)

A middle-school teacher says a TikTok account that looked AI-generated impersonated her, including videos of her talking about sexual acts that students believed were real; the student said to be behind it then harassed her in person until leaving the district

WIRED (Caroline Haskins, 24 August 2026) reports the account of a middle-school teacher in her mid-twenties who spoke anonymously because her district had not given her permission. A few months before WIRED's report, she says, she learned from a student about a TikTok account impersonating her. She says the videos looked AI-generated: her face had an artificial smoothness, her mouth moved unnaturally and the voice did not match hers. Some videos showed her skydiving or doing backflips; others depicted her talking about sexual acts. She says many of the students who warned her believed it was her account. She told her principal and says she was still unnerved by it; some students told her a classmate had made it, and after she asked students to report it the account was quickly taken down. She says the same student then harassed her in person with escalating insults; the principal removed the student from her class, and the harassment continued until the student left the district. WIRED gives no location for her school.

Core concern Medium reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 02/10/2026

Event date unknownUnited StatesUnidentified image tool

Arizona: a sixth-grade teacher says his students posted an AI-generated image of him kissing another male teacher in the comments of his public TikTok account; the school identified a student who admitted making it, who was suspended for three days

WIRED (Caroline Haskins, 24 August 2026) reports the account of an Arizona-based sixth-grade teacher, who spoke to WIRED by name (not repeated here). He says his students circulated an AI-generated photo showing him and another male teacher kissing in the comments of his public TikTok account. He reported the accounts to TikTok as belonging to children under 13, and says TikTok did not remove them. He says the school immediately investigated and identified a student, who admitted creating and sharing the image and received a three-day suspension; WIRED says the district handbook makes that the most severe punishment children of that age can receive for a first-time sexual harassment offense. He told WIRED that reflecting on the experience had sent him into a spiral, and said his concern was mainly the permissive culture around AI among his students. The district did not respond to WIRED. WIRED gives no date for the episode and does not name the school, district or AI tool.

Core concern Low reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 02/10/2026

12 Mar 2026United StatesUnidentified image tool

Los Banos, California: a substitute teacher says a sexualised AI image of him made from an old selfie circulated among middle-school students on TikTok and Snapchat and was used by a student account impersonating him; one student received in-school suspension and he stopped taking assignments at the middle school

WIRED (Caroline Haskins, 24 August 2026) reports the account of a substitute teacher in Los Banos, California, who spoke to WIRED by name (not repeated here). On 12 March 2026 a co-worker at his other job told him an AI photo was circulating on social media; the image reused a mirror selfie he had taken at a job in college but showed him in lingerie, posing suggestively. He traced an account sharing it on TikTok to a student at the middle school where he regularly substituted and reported it to the assistant principal; that evening he found a second account, created by a different student, impersonating him under a misspelled version of his name with the image as its profile picture. Over the following weeks he dealt with administrators, parents and the police; one student who admitted creating the image received an in-school suspension. He says the image was also shared on Snapchat, kept spreading among students and drew crude sexual comments on his TikTok account. He told administrators he would not take assignments at the middle school until the matter was addressed; at the local high school the same image was AirDropped to him during a class. WIRED says the district did not respond to its request for comment. He said he does not feel safe returning to the district. The Los Banos Enterprise (25 August 2026) summarised the WIRED account; no independent local reporting was found.

Core concern Medium reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/10/2026

2025Event location unknownUnidentified chatbot

First-person account (JURIST commentary): a Canadian convicted in Taiwan who read his court documents only through consumer chatbots says two systems gave opposite readings of an oversight body's letter in 2025; he published the favourable reading, cited it to journalists and drafted a legal submission on it before the agency confirmed in writing that it was wrong

In a commentary published by JURIST on 29 September 2026, Ross Cline, a Canadian who lived in Taichung for 15 years and was convicted there under Taiwan's Personal Data Protection Act (six months' imprisonment; final at the Supreme Court on 16 October 2024), writes that across four years of proceedings no document was translated for him, some hearings had no interpreter, and he read every summons, ruling and prosecutor's letter through a consumer chatbot, 'the only version I had'. In 2025 he ran a letter from a Taiwanese oversight body (the Control Yuan, per his media-brief page) through two systems; they disagreed on its central holding. He believed the one that told him what he wanted to hear, published that reading, cited it to journalists and began building a legal submission on it. In October 2025 the agency confirmed in writing that its letter did not say that; he withdrew the claim, killed the submission before filing and rewrote his public materials so that the correction leads. His own media-brief page carries a correction notice withdrawing two earlier statements. He argues that machine translation has become the interpreter of record by default for unrepresented non-citizens, that a fluent wrong translation reads as authoritative, and that courts should enforce the existing right to an interpreter. His conviction itself is not attributed to the chatbot.

Core concern Low reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 30/09/2026

16 Apr 2026KenyaMeta AI (reported)

Kenya: Sama announces more than 1,000 redundancies (1,108 by its own figure) after Meta ends its AI data-annotation contract, less than two months after annotators described intimate footage from Meta's AI glasses, and whether the two are linked is disputed

On 16 April 2026 Sama, an outsourcing company with operations in Nairobi that did AI data-annotation work for Meta, announced that Meta had given formal notice ending its contract and that a redundancy process would affect more than 1,000 employees. Sama put the figure at 1,108 workers, and the Oversight Lab said the workers had six days' notice. The decision came less than two months after the SvD and GP investigation in which Sama annotators said they had seen intimate footage from users of Meta's AI glasses. Meta said it paused its work with Sama the month before while it looked into those claims and then decided to end the work because Sama does not meet its standards. Sama says it was never notified of any failure to meet those standards. A Kenyan workers' organisation alleges Meta's decision was caused by staff speaking out, which Meta had not addressed when the BBC reported it on 30 April 2026. Employees told SvD that Sama tightened security and tried to identify who had spoken to journalists, which Sama denies. The workers are described by role and are not named.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity

AI involvement disputed · Causal attribution disputed · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

Oct 2025Event location unknownSora

Technology journalist Taylor Lorenz says her stalker is using Sora to make AI videos of her

On 2 October 2025, shortly after OpenAI's Sora 2 video app launched, journalist Taylor Lorenz posted on X that someone gave her stalker an invite to Sora and that he was already making AI videos of her. She wrote that he runs hundreds of accounts dedicated to her, has hired photographers to surveil her, appears at events she attends and impersonates her friends and family online to gather information. She said Sora let her block and delete unapproved content showing her image. Futurism and The Canary reported her posts. The videos were not inspected, no police or platform action beyond her use of the block-and-delete option is reported, and how the videos were made is unclear.

Core concern Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026

Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified video tool

Argentina: actor Jorge Martínez, 79, loses savings to two online scams days apart, one an investment platform promoted with AI-made fake videos of Lionel Messi and Javier Milei

The 79-year-old telenovela actor Jorge Martínez said in late September 2026 that he lost his savings to two online scams a few days apart. One was a supposed investment platform that, by his relayed and televised accounts, used fake videos of Lionel Messi (and, in several reports, Javier Milei) made with artificial intelligence. In a television interview he said the platform had Messi as its figurehead and that he later saw it was an artificial intelligence. The other began with callers posing as Temu, who promised him a 500,000-peso deposit as a favoured customer and asked for his bank details. His published tellings differ on which scam took what. In the account relayed by journalist Nahuel Saa (La Criti) on 28 September, the platform scam left his four bank accounts at zero and the Temu call took 1,400 dollars. In the television interviews reported on 29 September, the Temu call was followed by two loans requested in his name and the withdrawal of his savings, and the platform took an initial 149,600-peso deposit, showed a fictitious balance of 19,000 dollars and then took the last 1,400 dollars he had.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026

21 Sept 2026 to 25 Sept 2026FrancePangram AI-text detector

France: the Académie Goncourt removes Thélyson Orélien's bestselling novel from its prize selection, saying it is in all likelihood largely AI-generated, days after an anonymous X account publicised Pangram AI-detector scores; the author denies using AI, and the Académie also cites separate plagiarism in his older texts

On 21 September 2026 an anonymous X account, Balance ton Claude, said it had run excerpts of Thélyson Orélien's debut novel C'était ça ou mourir through the American AI-detection software Pangram, with some passages scoring up to 100 per cent probability of AI generation. On 25 September the Académie Goncourt removed the novel from the first selection of sixteen books for its 2026 prize, stating that the work is 'in all likelihood very largely the product of an artificial intelligence', based on 'the convergent result of several analyses by researchers and journalists', and also citing plagiarism in older texts by the author published in Canada (at least one short story and articles), which do not concern the novel. Orélien, a 38-year-old Canadian-Haitian writer whose novel had won the Fnac novel prize, denies using AI and says its repetitions and certain rhythms reflect his linguistic and cultural world and may be misread by automated tools. His Montreal publisher Boréal suspended promotional activities, saying it could neither confirm nor refute the allegations. Essayist Samuel Fitoussi said he was one of the people behind the account. Whether AI was used to write the novel is disputed; AI-detector reliability is itself contested in the coverage.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Internal Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/09/2026

Apr 2018IndiaUnidentified video tool

Indian journalist reports acute distress and a hospital visit after sexual deepfake abuse

An Indian journalist later reported acute distress and a hospital visit after a sexual deepfake of her circulated in April 2018. The generation tool and clinical records were not inspected.

Core concern High reported severity Media Coverage

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 25/09/2026

4 May 2026FranceDIGI editorial tool

Créteil, France: a court suspended Gisi's (Infopro Digital) plan to cut eight sub-editor posts in favour of a generative-AI tool, finding a serious and characterised risk to the physical and mental health of several categories of staff

Gisi, the Infopro Digital subsidiary publishing L'Usine nouvelle, LSA and L'Argus de l'assurance (127 staff, 92 journalists), presented to its works council (CSE) on 4 May 2026 a reorganisation built around 'DIGI', an in-house generative-AI editorial tool, and on 12 May 2026 opened consultation on the reorganisation and on the resulting collective dismissal of its eight secrétaires de rédaction (sub-editors), to be replaced by two chefs d'édition, on the company's estimate that the tool would take over about 70% of sub-editor tasks. Some 250 journalists across Infopro Digital's 26 titles had struck in spring 2026 against a group-wide plan to cut 19 sub-editor posts, and according to Digital Watch (citing Stratégies) five of the eight Gisi sub-editors had received pre-dismissal interview letters. The CSE, relying on an expert report, went to the Créteil judicial court in July. On 15 September 2026 the référé judge found that deploying the plan without real-situation testing presented 'un risque grave et caractérisé sur la santé physique et mentale de plusieurs catégories de salariés', ordered the suspension of the reorganisation and the collective dismissal (including the redeployment processes) until real-situation tests and full pilot issues are produced, with a provisional penalty of 8,000 euros per day for three months, and refused the damages provision. Gisi said it would continue the tests and reserved the right to appeal.

AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 20/09/2026

1 Aug 2024 to 26 Sept 2024South KoreaUnidentified image tool

South Korea Telegram AI Deepfake Sexual Abuse Crisis

In late August 2024, journalist Ko Narin of The Hankyoreh exposed networks of Telegram rooms in South Korea where AI tools were used to turn ordinary photos of women and girls — middle and high school pupils, university students, teachers and servicewomen — into sexual deepfakes, shared with their identities in school- and university-specific 'humiliation rooms'. Police figures showed 297 deepfake cases in January-July 2024 (vs 180 in all of 2023); the education ministry counted more than 900 victimized students, teachers and staff; President Yoon ordered a crackdown; and on 26 September 2024 the National Assembly criminalized possessing or viewing sexually explicit deepfakes. Victims were often minors and perpetrators mostly teenagers.

Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Criminal Charges

AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 7 sources, 6 underlying accounts · Added 29/01/2026

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: 05/10/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.