Last month, Google rolled out an updated version of its Photos app that had been divorced from Google+ and bolstered with a few slight tweaks—in particular, its ability to automatically tag photos and generate albums based on objects it identifies, including "food" and "landscapes."
Unfortunately, that object database not only included wild animals but also conflated them with humans—specifically, on Monday, when an African-American man looked in his Google Photos collection and discovered an automatically generated album of him and his black female friend labeled "gorillas."
The affected user, computer programmer Jacky Alciné, took to Twitter to post proof of the Google Photos error—which singled out the photos of two people together, and no others, in a single, mislabeled album—along with a question: "What kind of sample image data you collected that would result in this son?"
This isn't racist. The image recognition software made a mistake. It's not going to be right all the time, I highly, highly doubt Google programmed it to do this.
I'm sure if you did other things, like put pictures of hares Google's software might mistake it for rabbits, or it might mistake butterflies for moths and things like that. It's just a mistake. Humans are quite similar to gorillas.
This isn't racist. The image recognition software made a mistake. It's not going to be right all the time, I highly, highly doubt Google programmed it to do this.
I'm sure if you did other things, like put pictures of hares Google's software might mistake it for rabbits, or it might mistake butterflies for moths and things like that. It's just a mistake. Humans are quite similar to gorillas.
Hares rabbits
moths butterfiles
black people gorillas... got it.
it's pretty damn messed up and no I'm not racist
