Alibaba Expresses Concern Over Its Cloud Unit's Ethnicity Detection Algorithm

A recent incident involving an ethnicity detection algorithm used by Alibaba Cloud has raised concerns about the responsible use of AI technology. The algorithm, intended to identify individuals in images and videos, reportedly misclassified certain ethnicities with high error rates, causing alarm among users.

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/130

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.