Google apologizes after Photos app automatically tags black people as “gorillas”

The new automatic tagging feature in Google’s new Photos app has the capability to generate albums based on common objects and scenery such as food and objects in your photo album and classifies them in tagged albums. Google’s automatic photo recognition software has apparently incorrectly tagged pictures of two African-American people including Jack Alciné, a computer programmer, as “gorillas”.

The objects database is quite complex and includes wild animals which led to the conflicting tagging with humans. Jack Alciné took a screenshot of the Photos app error and posted in Twitter as proof of the mistake.

Shortly after the post, Alciné received an official response from Google’s Chief Social Architect Yonatan Zunger, who responded with:

“Holy fuck. G+ CA here. No, this is not how you determine someone’s target market. This is 100 percent not okay.”

To apologize, Zunger fixed the issue the same evening, and had removed the “gorilla” label from the Photos app’s database. He added that the app still has a lot of work to be done to improve its recognition software and its actions when a human face is not recognized. In addition, he mentioned that the app once tagged all people of all races as dogs due to a major bug.

Source: ArsTechnica

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