WeChat’s Machine Translation Gave a Racist English Translation for the Chinese Term for “Black Foreigner”

October 10, 2017

The Chinese platform WeChat's machine translation service inappropriately and racistly translated the Chinese term for 'black foreigner' to a derogatory English phrase. This highlights the need for safe and secure AI practices, especially in areas like AI governance. The HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) invites you to get involved in shaping trustworthy AI incident responses.

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MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.623, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.616, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.616, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: wechat
Alleged developer: wechat
Alleged harmed parties: black-wechat-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/216

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

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