Aussie artificial intelligence company Appen has been accused of racism after a job applicant revealed she was asked to take a ‘paper bag test’. The test originates from 20th-century slave owners, who used it to compare a person’s skin colour to a brown paper bag. US woman Charné Graham took to Twitter to say “as a Black woman the question is very off putting and triggering”. Appen apologised and said the question “is used to ensure diverse datasets are included in the collection and annotation used to train computer vision algorithms.” Which we’re not sure makes things any better… The ASX-listed company crowdsources labour for AI services for tech giants including Facebook and Google.