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.

No ad to show here.

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.

Read more: Is there really a solution to racism on Twitter?

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

To its credit, Google responded quickly:

Read more: Google gives image search a makeover, puts your results front and centre

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.

No ad to show here.

More

News

Sign up to our newsletter to get the latest in digital insights. sign up

Welcome to Memeburn

Sign up to our newsletter to get the latest in digital insights.

Exit mobile version