It looks like Google has a lot to answer for after its facial recognition software thought these two black people were gorillas. Some engineer is going to get it because the image recognition algorithm somehow couldn't differentiate human and animal.
Google Photo's snafu of Broolyn computer programmer Jacky Alcine and his friend isn't a laughing matter. Alcine found a photo of him and his friend, both of whom are black, were under the label of "Gorillas."
He took to Twitter to say:
Shortly, Google's chief social architect, Yonatan Zunger tweeted back:
Luckily, his response was quick. He said his team was being formed to address the racist label and it took 15 hours for it to be deleted from Alcine's Google Photo account. In an official statement, a Google person 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.”