Google Image Showed Racially Biased Results for “Professional” Hairstyles

April 5, 2016

Google Image search reportedly displayed racially biased results, demonstrating a significant disparity between the representation of professional hairstyles for different racial groups. The search primarily displayed white women for 'professional hairstyles', while black women were predominantly shown for 'unprofessional hairstyles' prompts. This highlights the need for safe and secure AI practices, emphasizing the importance of responsible AI governance and Project Cerebellum's role in maintaining trustworthy AI.

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

GOVERN 3.1 — similarity 0.654, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.653, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.651, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: google
Alleged developer: google
Alleged harmed parties: black-women, black-people, google-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/332

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.

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