Google Photos was a surprising star of the show at Google I/O 2015 with its new recognition feature being the most impressive of the lot. While it sounded almost too good to be true, it turns out it still has a few kinks in it, which developer Jacky Alcine found out it unfortunate fashion. While going through his collection of photos, the African-American Alcine found that he and a female friend had been labelled as “gorillas” by the recognition feature, and vented his dismay on Twitter:
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
Unsurprisingly, Google‘s Chief Social Architect Yonatan Zunger was on the case quickly and understandably apologetic: “Holy [expletive]. G+ CA here. No, this is not how you determine someone’s target market. This is 100 percent not okay.” Zunger then worked with Alcine to investigate an issue so that a fix could be rolled out to Photos as soon as possible. Ironically, Zunger also divulged that the Photos app had a similar problem early in development when it would label normal humans as “dogs”. In an official statement given to Ars Technica, Google said:
“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.”
What do you think about this Google Photos hiccup? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: Ars Technica via BGR
