Google photo software labels black people ‘gorillas’

[Jazzy]

Google’s automatic image recognition software has apparently picked up photographs of two black friends, and marked them as subhuman.

New Yorker Jacky Alcine was going through his pictures when he noticed an album titled ‘Gorillas’.

But when he opened it up all he found were images of himself and a friend.

Google official Yonatan Zunger quickly apologised on Twitter, saying: ‘Sheesh. High on my list of bugs you *never* want to see happen. ::shudder::’

He added the team were trying to fix the bug.

Programmers are working on longer-term fixes regarding words to be careful about in photos of people, he said, adding Google would also try to improve recognition of ‘dark-skinned faces’.

The point of the software is to save you the trouble of organising similar photos together, so for example you could easily find all birthday pictures in one place.

But someone definitely needs to sort this out.

Google said 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 labeling, and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future.

Source

This is horrible and they should have tested this software for any *bugs* before releasing it.

Your thoughts?

 

[Evil Eye]

Not really. When you create something like this, you'd expect it to get stuff wrong some of the time, what you probably don't expect is that it might offend people. So you release it telling people not to expect too much and wait for feedback from thousands of people and millions of pictures you couldn't possibly test yourself.

 

[DrLeftover]

Makes me wonder how good other facial recognition software is on 'dark-skinned faces'. Such as, the programs law enforcement uses to scan for terror suspects.

 

[+paradox]

Not really. When you create something like this, you'd expect it to get stuff wrong some of the time, what you probably don't expect is that it might offend people. So you release it telling people not to expect too much and wait for feedback from thousands of people and millions of pictures you couldn't possibly test yourself.

trial and error...

 

[WHO IS SERAFIN]

I am sure the people looking for racism in everything and everyone will claim it here as something intentional.

 

[DirtRider]