Google Apologizes After Photos App Mistakenly Identifies Black Couple as Gorillas
Google has issued an apology for Photos app's racist blunder. It says it's "appalled" that its new Photos app mistakenly labelled a black couple as being "gorillas".
Google's photos automatically tags uploaded pictures using its own artificial intelligence software.The error was brought to its attention by a New York-based software developer who was one of the people pictured in the photos involved, BBC noted.
"This is 100% not OK," acknowledged Google executive Yonatan Zunger after being contacted by Jacky Alcine via Twitter.
"[It was] high on my list of bugs you 'never' want to see happen."
He added that the search-engine giant has already taken steps to avoid others experiencing a similar mistake.
He added it was "also working on longer-term fixes around both linguistics - words to be careful about in photos of people - and image recognition itself - eg better recognition of dark-skinned faces".
"We're appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened," a spokeswoman told the BBC.
"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 labelling, and we're looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future."
