Racially Biased AI Incident: Passport Robot Allegedly Discriminates Against Applicant of Asian Descent

An incident involving a racially biased AI-powered passport robot has recently surfaced. The machine reportedly asked an applicant of Asian descent to 'open their eyes wider' during the verification process, sparking accusations of racial discrimination. This underscores the need for responsible AI governance and the implementation of guardrails to prevent such incidents.

Matched TAIM controls

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

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.561, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 3.4 — similarity 0.526, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.523, 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.