Two Twitter users used AI to digitally replace actress Halle Bailey, who is Black, with a white actress in The Little Mermaid trailer, promoting this as 'fixing' the film, resulting in both accounts being suspended for racist content.
In September 2022, Twitter users @TenGazillionIQ and @vandalibm used artificial intelligence to digitally alter The Little Mermaid trailer by replacing actress Halle Bailey, who is Black, with a computer-generated white actress. The AI scientist @TenGazillionIQ created the altered content, while @vandalibm promoted it with a tweet stating they had 'fixed' the trailer by turning the 'woke actor into a ginger white girl.' The user claimed they could process the entire movie in 24 hours using 4x A6000 graphics cards. When criticized, the promoter attempted to defend the action as 'purely educational' and asked users not to misinterpret it as racist. However, the viral tweet circulated during a period when Disney's official trailer had received over 1.5 million dislikes on YouTube from viewers upset about the casting of a Black actress as Ariel. Critics on Twitter quickly condemned both accounts for racist whitewashing of a real person. Both Twitter accounts were subsequently suspended by the platform. The incident occurred days after Disney was forced to disable the dislike button on their YouTube trailer due to the negative response.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
Unequal treatment of individuals or groups by AI, often based on race, gender, or other sensitive characteristics, resulting in unfair outcomes and unfair representation of those groups.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed