HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Google Lens’s Camera-Based Translation Feature Provided an Offensive Mistranslation of a Book Title in Korean

July 18, 2022

A book title by Korea’s first minister of culture was mistranslated into an offensive phrase by Google Lens’s camera-based translation feature allegedly due to its training on internet communications and a lack of context.
Alleged deployer
google
Alleged developer
google
Alleged harmed parties
google-lens-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/285

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.