Google apologises after photo app labels black couple ‘Gorillas’

Google has said it is “genuinely sorry” after its image recognition software labelled photographs of a black couple as “gorillas”. The Google Photos application, launched in May, uses an automatic tagging tool to help organise uploaded images and make searching easier. But the artificial intelligence software mistakenly described African-American computer programmer Jacky Alcine and his friend.

The only thing under this tag is my friend and I being tagged as a gorilla. What kind of sample image data you collected that would result in this son?

American computer programmer Jacky Alcine, who was in the photo.

On Monday, Mr Alcine, of Brooklyn, New York, spotted the egregious blunder. In a series of tweets to Google, he said: “Google Photos, y'all f***** up. My friend’s not a gorilla.” He received a response from Google’s chief social architect Yonatan Zunger later that day. “This is 100 percent not okay,” said Mr Zunger, promising a fix later that evening.

This is 100 percent not okay. We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened.

Google’s chief social architect Yonatan Zunger.

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