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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
3
Countries with reported events
2
Located 2 of 3 cases · 1 unknown
Languages in checked sources
2
Recorded for 3 of 3 cases
5Core concern
AI communicated, acted for, depicted or impersonated 3Contextual 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.

1cases with a recorded lawsuit outcome 1cases with a recorded regulatory response 1cases involving minors

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

When events happened

20 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.

3 2020
Reported severity MediumLow
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3 of 1101 published cases

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2020NetherlandsProctorio

Amsterdam student says Proctorio exam software repeatedly failed to detect her face; rights body found no discrimination but faulted complaint handling

During the 2020/21 academic year, when exams at VU Amsterdam were held online because of the pandemic, some exams required students to run Proctorio proctoring software, which according to the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights used face-detection algorithms during a pre-exam webcam check to judge whether the student was in view. A master's student says the software had trouble recognising her, that she regularly received 'face not found' or 'room too dark' messages, lost time, shone a bright lamp into her face while taking exams, and experienced stress and a feeling of insecurity; she suspected the failures were linked to her dark skin and complained to the Institute in July 2022. In an interim ruling of 7 December 2022 the Institute found sufficient indications for a presumption of discrimination. In its final ruling of 17 October 2023 it found that the university had proved it had not discriminated against her by using Proctorio: on the exam where her setup took longer than average (31 March 2021), the webcam check failed three times and she passed within eight seconds after the helpdesk advised her to remove her glasses, a known Proctorio problem the Institute treated as unrelated to skin colour; a restart during that exam was very likely caused by an unstable internet connection; and it considered it plausible that she had no need to keep a lamp shining in her face for long periods. It found that the university had discriminated in handling her complaint, which took from 1 October 2021 to 11 May 2022 to be taken up. The university apologised that she had not felt heard.

Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Regulatory Action

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 4 sources · Added 28/10/2026

2020Event location unknownHireVue

Three MAC make-up artists say an algorithm-marked HireVue video interview led to their redundancy; Estée Lauder settled their claims

City AM and Cosmetics Business reported in March 2022, relaying the BBC Three documentary Computer Says No and the Times, that three make-up artists at MAC, an Estée Lauder Companies brand, lost their jobs in a 2020 redundancy process after being told to reapply for their roles through a video interview run by HireVue and marked by an algorithm. City AM reports that they were made redundant partly as a result of the automated judgement. The women said no one could explain how they had been scored, and one said nobody watched the video. Estée Lauder settled their claims out of court; the amount was not disclosed. The company says staff were told in advance about the HireVue skills assessment, that the process was used in tandem with human decision-making, that facial recognition made up about 0.25% of the overall assessment and performance data and qualitative feedback most of it, and that any suggestion facial recognition played a decisive role is false. HireVue said its video-analysis component had been discontinued about two years earlier. How much the HireVue score weighed in each decision is not reported.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity

AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026

2 Aug 2020United StatesUnidentified license plate reader

Aurora, Colorado: police held a woman and four children at gunpoint in 2020 after a plate reader matched her SUV to a stolen motorcycle, The Denver Post reports

On 2 August 2020 Aurora police officers stopped an SUV they believed to be stolen, ordered the woman driving it and four children to lie on the ground at gunpoint, and handcuffed two of the children. The Denver Post reported that a license plate reader at an Aurora intersection had alerted police because the SUV had the same plate number as a stolen motorcycle from Montana, and that officers did not check the reading or the vehicle description. Prosecutors declined to charge the officers in January 2021 and called what happened unacceptable and preventable. The department said all officers were repeating training on license plate scanners. Sentinel Colorado reported that the department's system had flagged the SUV, which carried Colorado plates, and that the City of Aurora agreed in February 2024 to a $1.9 million settlement with the woman and the children to resolve a lawsuit over the officers' actions. One officer was suspended for 160 hours. The woman said the stop destroyed her mentally and that one of the children became withdrawn.

Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Involving minors Lawsuit Settled

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

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: 11/11/2026. Dataset available under CC BY 4.0.