Search engine giant Google landed in hot water due to their latest photo app mis-tagging a photo of A black man and woman with a racist term
Brooklyn computer programmer Jacky Alcine was one of the victims of the incident. Alcine posted a screenshot of Google‘s photo app arranged various similar photos in groups. The group of photos that featured the picture of Jacky Alcine and a female friend was labeled “gorillas.”
Alcine later tweeted,
“Google Photos, y’all f**ked up. My friend’s not a gorilla.”
Shortly after Alcine’s tweets, Google’s Chief Architect of Social, Yonatan Zunger, asked for permission to review his account in order to figure out how it happened. A couple of hours after receiving Alcine’s permission, Zunger tweeted that a solution to the problem was being worked on.
The Google app, which dropped in May, has the ability to examine the content of a photo and group them into categories through the use of artificial intelligence. This seems to be the only incident of mistagging photos in the app as there are groups of photos labeled as “airplanes,” “skyscrapers” and other images grouped and tagged correctly.
CBS News was told by a Google spokesperson, “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 labeling, and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future.”
-Jonathan Hailey(@JaySpeakEasy_)
