Google has just updated its Photos app that was separated from Google+, adding a few improvements such as the capability to tag pictures automatically and generate albums based on what the system is able to identify, such as albums for "landscapes" and "food."
However, the tweaks caused uproar as an African-American man discovered that his Google Photos collection generated an album of himself and a black female friend which was labeled as "gorillas."
The user, a computer programmer named Jacky Alciné, posted proof on Twitter regarding the error by Google Photos, showing that the album labeled as "gorillas" only included pictures of him and his friend together and no other pictures.
What kind of sample image data you collected that would result in this son?
— diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015
Within over an hour, Yonatan Zunger, the chief social architect of Google, responded to Alciné.
"This is 100 percent not okay," Zunger said, before requesting for deeper access into the account of the befuddled user and then promising a fix to be rolled out within the evening.
Zunger later confirmed that the label of "gorilla" has been deleted from the database of the app. He added that the development team still has work to accomplish when the Photos app did not recognize the face of a human, in addition to facial recognition.
Zunger specifically cited "dark-skinned faces" in his assessment, and added that the Photos app once had a glitch that tagged all kinds of people as dogs.
The issue was among the "really interesting problems in image recognition," as Zunger tweeted, explaining that the system was having trouble with obscured faces and varying contrast processing for various skin tones and lighting conditions, among others.
The conversation between Alciné and Zunger included several apologies from Zunger for the error, with Alcine thanking Zunger for looking into the issue.
"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," wrote a spokesperson from Google to technology news website ArsTechnica.
This is not the first time that tagging algorithms have encountered issues. After overhauling Flickr in May, Yahoo added such a feature automatically tagged photos. However, there were some instances that a black man's photo was tagged as "ape," and pictures of a concentration camp were tagged with "jungle gym" and "sport."
