Google Apologises After It’s App Was Extremely Racist To Two Users
It’s a pretty technologically dominated world and with Google sat at the top in the rankings of all the world’s websites, you expect pretty flawless service from them. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and Google’s new auto-tagging algorithm for Google Photos turned out to be a bit of a racist arsehole.
Skyscrapers, tick. Airplanes, tick. Cars, tick. Bikes, tick. Gorillas – no – what the f*ck Google?!
Google have always been known to be brave enough to roll out experimental technology and allowing users to experience the bugs – since it’s seen as one of the best ways to develop software – but when your software starts sending out racist slurs, that philosophy goes right out of the window.
Jacky Alcin , a computer programmer from Brooklyn, was uploading a number of shots to Google Photos this week and he definitely did not expect this. The idea of the app is for it to automatically tag pictures and place them into categories based on similar sample images – which seems pretty neat – until they get it oh so wrong.
Before even half an hour had passed, Google’s Chief Social Architect Yonatan Zunger replied, and the damage-control was evident:
Google quickly removed the “gorilla” tag entirely but will be looking for a more permanent solution to ensure mistakes like this don’t occur again. In a Twitter thread, Zunger goes on to explain that the facial recognition software has only just managed to fix the problem of light-skinned faces, formerly confusing them with dogs and seals.
Zunger was praised for his quick response and customer service by Jacky and Google also offered this official response,
“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 labelling, and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future.”
So fair play to the way they handled with the situation but…what a fuck up. Though, they are planning to give free Wi-Fi to the world, so maybe that will leave some people feeling pretty okay with them.