Google Photo's recognition algorithm has tagged photos of black Africans as gorillas. The photos were then sorted and placed in a special folder labeled after the animal.
The search giant developed the software to recognize common characteristics of images and group them together. Similar photos will then be placed in one folder, so that, for example, all pictures of a dog in a person's library will be found in one place. (Previous reports pointed out that the feature tagged a large dog as a horse).
"We're appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened," the company's spokesperson said to BBC yesterday. "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."
The discrepancy was first noticed by Jacky Alcine, user of the app. She noticed that photos of her with her friend were autotagged and placed in a folder named 'Gorillas'.
Alcine took to Twitter to express her dismay saying , "My friend is not a gorilla." Google's chief architect of social Yonatan Zunger responded to Alcine's tweet.
Zunger stated that the recognition feature has had problems since it was first introduced in May. He said that the obscured faces caused the faulty recognition, noting that others had photos of their faces tagged as dogs and horses.
Alcine said that the auto-tag problem is still occurring. Google is said to have begun fixing the issue.
Google has recently been criticized because of Google Maps' use of the discriminatory term "nigger" to locate the White House in its maps. Similarly, the search engine showed President Barack Obama as the search result for the query "nigger king". The company issued an apology regarding the issue last May.
