AI-infused search engines from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity have all been surfacing deeply racist and widely debunked research promoting race science and the idea that whites are genetically superior to nonwhites. Patrik Hermansson, a researcher with UK-based anti-racism group Hope Not Hate, was in the middle of a months-long investigation into the resurgent race science movement when he needed to find out some more information about a debunked dataset that claims IQ scores can be used to prove the superiority of the white race. Hermansson was investigating the Human Diversity Foundation, a race science company funded by Andrew Conru, the US tech billionaire who founded Adult Friend Finder. The group, founded in 2022, was the successor to the Pioneer Fund, a group founded by US Nazi sympathizers in 1937 with the aim of promoting "race betterment" and "race realism." Hermansson logged onto Google and began looking up results for the IQs of different nations.

WASHINGTON – Facial recognition systems can produce wildly inaccurate results, especially for nonwhites, according to a U.S. government study released Thursday that is likely to raise fresh doubts on deployment of the artificial intelligence technology. The study of dozens of facial recognition algorithms showed "false positives" rates for Asians and African-Americans as much as 100 times higher than for whites. The researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a government research center, also found two algorithms assigned the wrong gender to black females almost 35 percent of the time. The study comes amid widespread deployment of facial recognition for law enforcement, airports, border security, banking, retailing, schools and for personal technology such as unlocking smartphones. Some activists and researchers have claimed the potential for errors is too great and that mistakes could result in the jailing of innocent people, and that the technology could be used to create databases that may be hacked or inappropriately used.