AI Incident: Robot Passport Checker Fails to Recognize Open-Eyed Asian Man

In an incident highlighting potential racial bias, a robot passport checker at an airport failed to identify an open-eyed Asian man due to his eyes being closed in the photo submitted. The system is designed to verify travelers' identities, yet it appears to struggle with recognizing certain ethnic groups.

Matched TAIM controls

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

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.513, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.503, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.503, 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.