Incident: Racial Discrimination in AI – New Zealand Government Website

An Asian man was recently denied a passport renewal on the New Zealand government website due to an apparent racial bias displayed by the AI-powered chatbot. The bot's response, which instructed him to 'open your eyes', has sparked concerns about racial discrimination in AI systems. This incident highlights the importance of responsible AI governance and trustworthy AI models for safe and secure operations.

Matched TAIM controls

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

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.538, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 1.7 — similarity 0.505, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.502, 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.