Incident 401: Kannada Insulted by Google's Featured Answer as "Ugliest Language in India"

Description: Google's knowledge-graph-powered algorithm showed Kannada in its featured Answer Box when prompted "ugliest language in India," causing outrage from Kannada-speaking people and government.

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Alleged: Google developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed the Karnataka government and Kannada speakers.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
401
Report Count
4
Incident Date
2021-06-03
Editors
Khoa Lam
Google’s answer to “ugliest language” query was Kannada. An apology follows
hindustantimes.com · 2021

Bengaluru: Google, the US-based search engine giant, on Thursday found itself at the receiving end of severe criticism over its search results that returned Kannada as the answer to a question on India’s “ugliest language”.

According to the…

India’s ‘Ugliest’ Language? Google Had an Answer (and Drew a Backlash).
nytimes.com · 2021

It was an odd, unanswerable question. Still, it was on the mind of at least one Google user in India.

What is the country’s “ugliest” language?

For anyone who typed the question into the platform’s search bar recently, its algorithm produce…

Why Google showed Kannada as 'ugliest language of India': Explained
hindustantimes.com · 2021

Google attracted a massive backlash in the country recently after it showed Kannada, a language predominantly spoken in the southwest part of India, as the answer to the search query "ugliest languages".

Kannada language speakers slammed th…

Insult to Kannada shows Google AI in a poor light
deccanherald.com · 2021

A Google search for ‘the ugliest language in India’ yielded ‘Kannada’ as the answer late last week, causing widespread outrage.

Google has since apologised, saying the answer does not reflect its views, but questions still remain about why …

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.

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