Facebook's AI Put "Primates" Label on Video Featuring Black Men

June 27, 2020

Facebook's AI inappropriately labeled a video with Black men as one about 'primates,' causing offensive prompts to appear for users. This underscores the need for trustworthy, safe, and secure AI practices. For those interested in shaping responsible AI governance and incident mapping through HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM, JOIN US.

This incident highlights the importance of implementing robust guardrails for AI to prevent such harm. By participating in our AI incident database, you can help drive the development of safe and secure AI practices.

Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.683, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.675, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.666, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: facebook
Alleged developer: facebook
Alleged harmed parties: black-people, facebook-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/113

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.