Black friends angry when Google Photos app tags them as gorillas

New York programmer was shocked to see the Google Photos app tagged his selfie as ‘gorillas’. Picture: Twitter/@jackyalcine Source: Supplied

GOOGLE has been forced to apologise after its new Photos app automatically tagged photos of black people as ‘gorillas’.

The internet giant’s latest Google Photos application uses an auto-tagging feature to help organise uploaded images.

But the app was anything but helpful for Jacky Alcine, whose selfie with a friend was grouped into a collection called ‘gorillas’.
Mr Alcine, a computer programmer from Brooklyn in New York, is of Haitian descent.
He tweeted a grab of the offensive tag on Twitter with the message: “Google Photos, y’all f****d up. My friend’s not a gorilla.”

Google Photos, y'all fucked up. My friend's not a gorilla. pic.twitter.com/SMkMCsNVX4

— diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015

He followed with another series of photos, writing: “What kind of sample image data you collected that would result in this son?”
Within hours, Mr Alcine received a response from Google’s chief social architect, Yonatan Zunger, who promised to fix the facial recognition bug.
“Holy f**k. G+ CA here. No, this is not how you determine someone’s target market. This is 100 per cent not okay,” 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

On Tuesday, Mr Zunger confirmed via Twitter that the ‘gorilla’ label had been removed from the app’s database, but admitted “lots still (needs) to be done” with the facial recognition algorithm.
“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).”
Comparing black people to monkeys and gorillas has a long racist history, with Australian sporting stars Adam Goodes and Andrew Symonds revealing they’ve been subjected to disgusting monkey taunts during their games.

.@jackyalcine We've got a fix rolling out into prod now; ETA of a few hours for it to be fully live.

— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015

Google apologised for the shocking glitch in a statement: “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 labelling, and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future.”
This is not the first time Google Photos has mislabelled one species as another.