Values Statement: We believe AI should cause no harm, but enhance the quality of human life, by proactively adopting our AI Governance framework.

Evidence-based Transparent For governance

AI Incidents

TAIM catalog Map Data source & citation Failure Files™

Robot passport checker rejects Asian man's photo for having his eyes closed

In an incident highlighting potential racial bias, a robot passport checker at an airport failed to identify an open-eyed Asian man due to h...

New Zealander says passport photo rejection 'not racist'

A New Zealander claims their passport application was rejected due to an alleged racial bias in the AI-powered photo scanning system. The in...

An algorithm rejected an Asian man's passport photo for having "closed eyes"

A troubling incident involving an AI-powered passport control system occurred recently, where a man of Asian descent was denied boarding due...

New Zealand Passport Photo Checker Rejects Asian Guy’s Picture, Says His Eyes Are Closed

An incident involving the New Zealand passport photo checker has highlighted the risks of AI bias. The system, designed to verify passport p...

Passport blunder sees photo rejected for 'closed eyes'

In an incident involving AI image analysis, a traveler's passport application was rejected due to the system's misinterpretation of open eye...

New Zealand Passport Website Rejects Asian Man's Photo For Having 'Closed' Eyes

An unfortunate incident occurred when an individual of Asian descent was denied a passport due to the facial recognition system on the offic...

NZ government accused of racism after passport renewal software ‘failed’ Asian man’s photo

A New Zealand resident, Mr. K, recently faced issues with the renewal of his passport due to a failure in the facial recognition software us...

Racist robot rejects Asian man's passport photo, claiming 'eyes are closed'

Recent incident highlighted a racial bias within an automated passport authentication system. An Asian man was denied clearance due to the s...

Facial recognition software rejects Asian man's passport photo because it thinks his eyes are closed

An unfortunate incident occurred when a man of Asian descent was unable to verify his identity using facial recognition technology at an air...

Racist robot? New Zealand govt website tells Asian man to open eyes, rejects passport

An Asian man was recently denied a passport renewal on the New Zealand government website due to an apparent racial bias displayed by the AI...

'Racist' robot rejects Asian-face passport photo

A recent incident involving an automated passport control system in Malaysia has raised concerns about the potential for biases in AI system...

New Zealand passport reader accuses Asian of having 'eyes closed'

Recent reports suggest that the New Zealand passport reader may have incorrectly identified an individual as Asian due to perceived 'eyes cl...

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.