WeChat's Machine Translation: Racist Mishap Highlights Need for Responsible AI — Join Us to Advance Trustworthy AI

October 10, 2017

The Chinese platform WeChat encountered a racially insensitive incident with its machine translation service, translating the term for 'black foreigner' inappropriately. This underscores the importance of safe and secure AI, particularly in AI governance. Join us to contribute to Project Cerebellum's AI incident database and help shape trustworthy AI. This AI incident maps to the Govern function in HISPI Project Cerebellum Trusted AI Model (TAIM).
Alleged deployer
wechat
Alleged developer
wechat
Alleged harmed parties
black-wechat-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/216

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.