AI incident #18 ·
Gender Biases of Google Image Search
What happened
Google Image returns results that under-represent women in leadership roles, notably with the first photo of a female "CEO" being a Barbie doll after 11 rows of male CEOs.
Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.
News reports (10)
Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
AI systems implicated
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Discrimination and Toxicity
- Risk subdomain
- 1.1 Unfair discrimination and misrepresentation
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Unintentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- none
- Sectors
- information and communication
- Countries
- US
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 1.1.
- Discrimination
"Discrimination - Unfair or inadequate treatment or arbitrary distinction based on a person’s race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual preference, religion, national origin, marital status, disability, language, or other pro...
- Harms of Representation and Other Biases
"A pretrained LLM generally has many of the stereotypical biases commonly present in the human society (Touvron et al., 2023). This makes it difficult for users to trust that LLMs will work well for them and not produce...
- Risks from bias and underrepresentation
"The outputs and impacts of general- purpose AI systems can be biased with respect to various aspects of human identity, including race, gender, culture, age, and disability. This creates risks in high- stakes domains su...
- Bias
"General-purpose AI systems can amplify social and political biases, causing concrete harm. They frequently display biases with respect to race, gender, culture, age, disability, political opinion, or other aspects of hu...
- Bias
"The training datasets of LLMs may contain biased information that leads LLMs to generate outputs with social biases"
- Toxicity and Bias Tendencies
"Extensive data collection in LLMs brings toxic content and stereotypical bias into the training data."
- Biased Training Data
"Compared with the definition of toxicity, the definition of bias is more subjective and contextdependent. Based on previous work [97], [101], we describe the bias as disparities that could raise demographic differences...
- Broken systems
"These are the most mentioned cases. They refer to situations where the algorithm or the training data lead to unreliable outputs. These systems frequently assign disproportionate weight to some variables, like race or g...
Related incidents on the AI Incident Database
Linked by AIID editors or by its text-similarity model.
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
- DOGE Reportedly Relied on Unvetted ChatGPT Outputs in Canceling National Endowment for the Humanities Grants
- Sora Video Generator Has Reportedly Been Creating Biased Human Representations Across Race, Gender, and Disability
- Meta AI Characters Allegedly Exhibited Racism, Fabricated Identities, and Exploited User Trust
- Alleged AI-Generated Photo Alteration Leads to Inappropriate Modifications in Speaker's Conference Picture
- Algorithmic Bias in French Welfare System Allegedly Discriminates Against Marginalized Groups
- Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) AI Systems Allegedly Discriminate Against Single Mothers
Other incidents involving Google
- NPR Host David Greene Alleged Google's NotebookLM Replicated His Voice Without Consent, Prompting Lawsuit
- Google AI-Generated Search Summary Reportedly Falsely Implicated Canadian Musician in Sexual Offenses, Leading to Concert Cancellation
- Google's Bard, Gemini, and Gemma AI Systems Allegedly Generated Defamatory Claims About Activist Robby Starbuck, Prompting Lawsuit
- Purportedly AI-Generated Hunting Regulation Errors Reportedly Lead to Idaho Citation and Multi-State Warnings from Wildlife Agencies
- Google Gemini Reportedly Reinforced Delusions, Allegedly Contributing to Florida User's Near-Harm Episode and Suicide
- Google AI Overviews Reportedly Misrepresented Pizza Specials at Stefanina's in Wentzville, Missouri