Description: NHK announced the termination of its AI-powered multilingual subtitle service after an automatic translation error rendered "Senkaku Islands" as "Diaoyu Islands," the Chinese designation. The mistake, discovered on February 10th, 2025 during a news segment, led NHK to deem the service inappropriate. The AI-based subtitles, powered by Google Translate, had been in use since 2020.
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The OECD AI Incidents and Hazards Monitor (AIM) automatically collects and classifies AI-related incidents and hazards in real time from reputable news sources worldwide.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Google developed an AI system deployed by NHK, which harmed NHK , Government of Japan , NHK viewers , Public trust in the media and Japan-China relations.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Google Translate API , NHK AI subtitle translator and NHK live streaming service
Incident Stats
Incident ID
934
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2025-02-10
Editors
Dummy Dummy
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
On the 12th, NHK announced that it had found cases where the "Senkaku Islands" were displayed as the Chinese spelling "Diaoyu Islands" in its service, which provides live streaming of 24-hour English TV broadcasts on its website and app, an…
NHK announced on the 12th that it would end its multilingual subtitle service for live streaming of English international TV broadcasts on its official website and elsewhere on the 10th. The service had been using Google's artificial intell…
Variants
A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
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