2 min read
Google apologized to a black man this week after a bug in their new Photos app categorized pictures in the most racist manner possible. Jacky Alcine called out to Google when their Photos app categorized him and his friend under the category of ‘Gorillas’. He quickly took to Twitter informing everyone of this embarrassing flaw in Google’s facial recognition algorithm and raised the question about what sort of sample images they had used that made their algorithm racist.
Google Photos, y’all fucked up. My friend’s not a gorilla. pic.twitter.com/SMkMCsNVX4
— diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015
@yonatanzunger Two photos show up under the term now (for both Gorilla and Gorillas). Sending a DM of image. — diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015
Google’s Chief Social Architect Yonatan Zunger was quick to respond and apologized for the mistake. The Google team then solved this problem and created a fix in about an hour. However, Alcine reported that two of his pictures were still showing up in the Gorillas category. Zunger responded that the problem has been sent forth for a more permanent fix. But for now the word Gorillas has been removed as category label. Google is now working on improving their facial recognition software to make their algorithm more language sensitive.
@jackyalcine Quick update: we shouldn’t be making piles with that label anymore, and searches are mostly fixed, but they can still turn up..
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
