Google has issued an apology after a man took to Twitter to show the company's new photo app had added photos of his dark-skinned friend to an album tagged "gorillas".
Jacky Alcine, a US computer programmer, was outraged to see the racially charged term appear in the app, which uses face and object recognition software to automatically tag and sort photos.
To prove it wasn't a once-off error, Alcine also tweeted a screenshot showing every image of his friend was being added to the folder, and suggested the reference images Google had collected did not have black people in mind.
"This is how you determine someone's target market", he tweeted.
And it's only photos I have with her it's doing this with (results truncated b/c personal): pic.twitter.com/h7MTXd3wgo— diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine)
June 29, 2015
Alcine's original post was retweeted more than a thousand times, and it only took a couple of hours for Yonatan Zunger, the chief architect of Google's social systems, to reach out.
"Holy f... G+ CA here. No, this is not how you determine someone's target market. This is 100 per cent not okay," he replied.
Asking permission to access Alcine's account data, Zunger put his team to work analysing the error and rolling out a fix.
He later said the "gorilla" tag had been removed from the database entirely, but that the team would continue to work on a deeper fix.
"We're 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)," he wrote.
An official Google statement reads in part: "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."
