Google Has Issued An Apology After Google Photos Labels Black People “Gorillas”
Google has sent out a huge public apology after Google Photos accidentally labelled a picture of two black people as being “gorillas”.
Google photos, which launched in May, automatically tags uploaded pictures using its own artificial intelligence software. The mistakes was founded by Jacky Alcine, a US computer programmer, who was pretty pissed off:
Google Photos, y’all fucked up. My friend’s not a gorilla. pic.twitter.com/SMkMCsNVX4
— diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015
Fuck, the only thing under this tag is my friend and I being tagged as a gorilla. What the fuck? -__
— diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015
Google clearly has pooped its pants a little bit. Yonaton Zunger, chief architect of social at Google, sent 14 tweets in reply to Alcine’s problem. Giving Alcine, and Twitter followers, a constant update with the progress:
@jackyalcine Paging the team to look into this now.
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine Can we have your permission to examine the data in your account in order to figure out how this happened?
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine Thanks. Team is on it now. If we need any more info, I’ll let you know.
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
.@jackyalcine We’ve got a fix rolling out into prod now; ETA of a few hours for it to be fully live.
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine Can we ping you to make sure that it’s fixed for you once it’s fully live?
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine Thank you for telling us so quickly! Sheesh. High on my list of bugs you *never* want to see happen. ::shudder::
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@wiselar @louisgray @jackyalcine I wish it were. Until recently, it was confusing white faces with dogs and seals. Machine learning is hard.
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 30, 2015
@jackyalcine Handing it to the team. Seriously, big thanks for helping us fix this: it makes a real difference.
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine Quick update: we shouldn’t be making piles with that label anymore, and searches are mostly fixed, but they can still turn up..
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine ..photos where we failed to recognize that there was a face there at all. We’re working on that issue now.
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine We’re also working on longer-term fixes around both linguistics (words to be careful about in photos of people [lang-dependent]
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine and image recognition itself. (e.g., better recognition of dark-skinned faces)
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine Lots of work being done, and lots still to be done. But we’re very much on it.
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
@jackyalcine We should have a patch around searches turning up pics of partially obscured faces out very soon.
— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015
A Google spokesperson told the BBC: “We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened. We’re taking immediate action to prevent this type of result from appearing.
“There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labelling, and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future.”
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