An artificial-intelligence art project has been criticised for using racist and sexist tags to classify its users.

When they share a selfie with ImageNet Roulette, the web app matches it to the ones it most closely resembles from an enormous library of profile photos.

It then reveals the most popular tag, assigned to the matching pictures by human workers using data set WordNet.

These include racial slurs, "first offender", "rape suspect", "spree killer", "newsreader", and "Batman".

Those responsible for assigning the tags to the library pictures were recruited via a service offered by Amazon, called Mechanical Turk, which pays workers around the world pennies to perform small, monotonous tasks.

"AI classifications of people are rarely made visible to the people being classified," ImageNet Roulette's creators, artist Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford, co-founder of New York University's AI Institute, said.

"ImageNet Roulette provides a glimpse into that process - and to show the ways things can go wrong."

Ms Crawford added they hoped the project "gives us at least a moment to start to look back at these systems, and understand, in a more forensic way, how they see and categorise us".

Users have been uploading pictures of their pets.

Featured on the first picture, my mother's cat, Vinzent.Featured on the second picture, me.All I will say is THAT I'M ON TO YOU #imagenetroulette YOU AND YOUR TRUE OVERLORDS!!! #conspiracy pic.twitter.com/mIJii0tzlm

End of Twitter post by @straybatstrut

My poor baby pic.twitter.com/aJduJFkXsW

End of Twitter post by @GGhosteyes

Others have been categorised into professions.

Everyone's out there sharing their ImageNet Roulette classifications, demonstrating the racism, sexism, homophobia, and injustice built into machine learning, and then there's me, getting classified as a 'zoo keeper' https://t.co/gobzUt4vfm pic.twitter.com/TTjz8NhjRR

End of Twitter post by @SustainableRich

It got my field wrong, but hey at least ImageNet Roulette thinks I look like an academic? pic.twitter.com/ZykiOCc7vI

End of Twitter post by @DrDreHistorian

Okay, it seems that ImageNet things I look like a nerd... Try out ImageNet Roulette to see how you would be classified by a neural network trained on the most used image recognition data set https://t.co/eu4Pk6ZkxE https://t.co/N0yjLTESxq pic.twitter.com/sjFwv4To7b

End of Twitter post by @evelgab

And one person was tagged "heroine".

Thank you @trevorpaglen @katecrawford for #ImageNetRoulette you've made my morning ;-) pic.twitter.com/FEIMh9WoIe

End of Twitter post by @sarahecook