AI Incident: Passport Algorithm Misidentifies Closed Eyes as Inappropriate

A troubling incident involving an AI-powered passport control system occurred recently, where a man of Asian descent was denied boarding due to the rejection of his passport photo. The AI system deemed the photograph inadmissible because it detected 'closed eyes.' However, upon review, it was apparent that the man's eyes were simply closed naturally in the picture.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.542, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.538, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.531, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/48

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.