BiasMedium
WeChat’s Machine Translation Gave a Racist English Translation for the Chinese Term for “Black Foreigner”
- Occurred
- Oct 10, 2017
- Published
- Oct 12, 2017
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
The Chinese platform WeChat provided an inappropriate and racist English translation for the Chinese term for “black foreigner” in its messaging app.
Developers
Deployers
Harmed parties
- Black WeChat users
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: WeChat's translation feature produced racist output, reflecting algorithmic bias in language processing.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8