Google apologises for tagging black people’s photos as 'Gorillas'

Google had earlier retired the photo category from Google+ just to release its own standalone version of an app, named Google Photos. This app recently received an update, which has an ability to automatically scan photos being uploaded and tag and generate albums according to the objects in the frame. The tagging includes object identification algorithms, which include food, landscapes and many more.

Unfortunately, Google’s object database also included wild animals, which incidentally also conflated them with humans. ArsTechnica reported that an African-American man was scrolling through the albums in his collection. To his shock, he noticed that the Google Photos app has been tagging his photos and also of his female friend and automatically generated an album called ‘Gorillas’.

The victim, Jacky Alcine, a computer programmer by profession, took the matter to Twitter and posted the erratic tagging by Google Photos as proof. He pointed out that Google Photos was tagging out all the photos of him and his female friend and grouping it in a mislabeled album called Gorillas. The tweet also carried out a question, which stated, ‘What kind of sample image data you collected that would result in this son?’

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Google's Chief Social Architect Yonatan Zunger immediately responded within an hour and a half. His tweet replied, ‘Holy fuck. G+ CA here. No, this is not how you determine someone's target market. This is 100 percent not okay.’ He also asked Jacky for access to his account to rectify the problem, post which he would release a bug fix roll out the same day.

The next day, Zunger tweeted confirming that the Google Photos app was indeed erratic and the ‘Gorilla’ label has been removed from the database of the new update. He also mentioned that his team still had to work on the app to recognize a human face, claiming, ‘lot’s needs to be done’ in terms of face recognition. He additionally confirmed that the earlier app had another bug, which was tagging humans as dogs. The twitter conversation between from Zunger to Jackie was filled with apologies, along with a strong ‘Thank You’ from the latter.

Google’s spokesperson offered a statement to ArsTechnica, which mentioned, ‘We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened. 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.’