Google’s image recognition tool lands it in hot water

Google engineers have had to scramble to fix a flaw in its recently released Photos app, which saw black people labeled as gorillas.

The bug was first brought to public attention by programmer Jacky Alciné, who noticed that the app kept labeling photos of him and his friend as gorillas.

The feature at fault is one that automatically tags and arranges users photos according to objects in the photos. So if it recognises a mountain, then it will place the photo in the “mountains” category.

It’s supposed to learn as it goes along, as Alciné’s experience shows there are still some pretty big flaws that need to be ironed out.

Given the incredibly unpleasant associations which have historically been drawn between black people and various members of the ape family, Alciné was understandably incensed.

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He tweeted Google to ask it how it could possibly allow this kind of thing to happen:

Google Photos, y'all fucked up. My friend's not a gorilla. pic.twitter.com/SMkMCsNVX4

— diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015

To its credit, Google responded quickly:

@jackyalcine Holy fuck. G+ CA here. No, this is not how you determine someone's target market. This is 100% Not OK.

— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015

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According to The Verge, it initially tried to fix the image recognition algorithm before removing the Gorillas tag altogether.

The company says it’s working on longer term fixes that revolve around better recognition for darker-skinned faces and labels that could prove problematic.