Google apologises after photo app labels black couple as 'gorillas'
Google has offered an apology to a couple after its photo recognition software tagged photographs of them as ‘gorillas’.
The Google Photos application, which launched in May, uses an automatic tagging tool to help users organize uploaded photos and make searching easier.
However the artificial intelligence software made the cruel mistake of describing African-American computer programmer Jacky Alcine and his friend as ‘gorillas.’
When Mr Alcine, of Brooklyn, New York, spotted the highly offensive mistake he fired off a series of tweets to Google.
"Google Photos, y'all f***** up. My friend's not a gorilla,” he said.
"The only thing under this tag is my friend and I being tagged as a gorilla."
"What kind of sample image data you collected that would result in this son?"
Later that day he received a response from Google’s chief social architect Yonatan Zunger.
"This is 100 percent not okay," said Mr Zunger, who promised to fix the mistake by the end of the day.
Google also offered an apology.
“We're appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened,” a statement said.
"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."
The incident has been dubbed ‘the first instance of A.I racism’ by Twitter users.
