Sall Grover launched Giggle, a women-only networking platform, in 2020. The app allows women to form communities and search for potential business partners, housemates and friends. With categories ranging from gaming to periods to mental health, the platform offered a safe space for women to interact freely. However, Grover's sign up process sparked a Twitter storm of late. To sign up on Giggle, users have to click a selfie, which the app then analyses using facial recognition software to verify their gender.

Some tech companies make a splash when they launch, others seem to bellyflop. Genderify, a new service that promised to identify someone's gender by analyzing their name, email address, or username with the help AI, looks firmly to be in the latter camp. The company launched on Product Hunt last week, but picked up a lot of attention on social media as users discovered biases and inaccuracies in its algorithms. Type the name "Meghan Smith" into Genderify, for example, and the service offers the assessment: "Male: 39.60%, Female: 60.40%." Other names prefixed with "Dr" produce similar results while inputs seem to generally skew male. "Test@test.com" is said to be 96.90 percent male, for example, while "Mrs Joan smith" is 94.10 percent male.

Issues surrounding gender and other biases in machine learning (ML) … Synced Report | A Survey of China’s Artificial Intelligence Solutions in …

Just hours after making waves and triggering a backlash on social media, Genderify -- an AI-powered tool designed to identify a person's gender by analyzing their name, username or email address -- has been completely shut down. Launched last week on the new-product showcase website Product Hunt, the platform was pitched as a "unique solution that's the only one of its kind available in the market," enabling businesses to "obtain data that will help you with analytics, enhancing your customer data, segmenting your marketing database, demographic statistics," according to Genderify creator Arevik Gasparyan. Here is a quick read: AI-Powered'Genderify' Platform Shut Down After Bias-Based Backlash