Startup's Accent Translation AI Denounced as Reinforcing Racial Bias

August 15, 2021

A startup's use of AI voice technology to alter or remove accents for call center agents has come under scrutiny as perpetuating racial bias, sparking debate around the need for trustworthy and safe AI practices. For those interested in shaping the future of responsible AI governance and mapping incidents like this to Project Cerebellum's HISPI TAIM (Measure function), JOIN US. By joining, you can help establish guardrails for AI and ensure its use promotes harm prevention rather than perpetuating biases.

Matched TAIM controls

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 →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.650, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.1 — similarity 0.645, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: sanas
Alleged developer: sanas
Alleged harmed parties: call-center-agents-having-non-midwestern-american-accent, people-having-non-midwestern-american-accent

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/312

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.