Google was forced to publicly apologize after the Google Photos application, based on its image recognition software that uses an auto-tagging tool to help organize uploaded images and make searching easier, labelled photographs of a black couple as “gorillas”.
“We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened. We are taking immediate action to prevent this type of result from appearing. There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labeling, and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future,” Google said in a statement.
The racist blunder was spotted by the victim Jacky Alcine, a computer programmer from Brooklyn, New York; he was stunned to see his and his friend’s photos labeled as “gorillas” in an album on Google Photos. He launched a series of Tweets addressed to Google, which prompted Google to admit the gaffe.
Google Photos, y’all fucked up. My friend’s not a gorilla. pic.twitter.com/SMkMCsNVX4
— [email protected]/its/lit (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015
Fuck, the only thing under this tag is my friend and I being tagged as a gorilla. What the fuck? -__ — [email protected]/its/lit (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015
What kind of sample image data you collected that would result in this son?
— [email protected]/its/lit (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015
And it’s only photos I have with her it’s doing this with (results truncated b/c personal): pic.twitter.com/h7MTXd3wgo — [email protected]/its/lit (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015
His tweets triggered a response from Yonatan Zunger, chief architect of social at Google, the ‘error’ was ‘fixed’.
@jackyalcine Thank you for telling us so quickly! Sheesh. High on my list of bugs you *never* want to see happen. ::shudder::
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine We’re also working on longer-term fixes around both linguistics (words to be careful about in photos of people [lang-dependent] — Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine ..photos where we failed to recognize that there was a face there at all. We’re working on that issue now.
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine Quick update: we shouldn’t be making piles with that label anymore, and searches are mostly fixed, but they can still turn up.. — Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@yonatanzunger Two photos show up under the term now (for both Gorilla and Gorillas). Sending a DM of image.
— [email protected]/its/lit (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine Handing it to the team. Seriously, big thanks for helping us fix this: it makes a real difference. — Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
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