Incident 332: Google Image Showed Racially Biased Results for “Professional” Hairstyles

Description: Google Image search reportedly showed disparate results along racial lines, featuring almost exclusively white women for “professional hairstyles” and black women for “unprofessional hairstyles” prompts.

Tools

New ReportNew ReportNew ResponseNew ResponseDiscoverDiscover
Alleged: Google developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Black women , Black people and Google users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
332
Report Count
4
Incident Date
2016-04-05
Editors
Khoa Lam

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

Similar Incidents

By textual similarity

Did our AI mess up? Flag the unrelated incidents