A social media app just for 'females' intentionally excludes trans women — and some say its face-recognition AI discriminates against women of color, too
An app marketed towards "females" has faced a barrage of online criticism for excluding transgender women with its use of artificial intelligence.
Giggle, which first launched in early 2020, according to The Verge, uses facial recognition to determine if new users are male or female.
"The way the app works is when you install it, you have to take a picture of yourself and it uses AI to analyze your face," said Jenny, a 23-year-old trans woman from California. "And if it decides you're a woman, it will let you in. If it decides you're a man, it will reject you. But if it rejects you, you can just submit another picture."
Giggle's founder and CEO, Sall Grover, has brashly pushed back against online criticism, including claims that the app uses technology that has failed to properly identify women of color, while publicly embracing an ideology that's considered harmful to trans people.
"This particular combination of gender categorization and facial recognition and race is something that we absolutely know is a problem," Casey Fiesler, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies technology ethics, told Insider.
