Google Photos auto-tags two black people as "gorillas"; Google apologizes

Google Photos, launched in May 2015, tags uploaded pictures automatically using its own image-recognition software. On 29 June it labelled a photo of Jacky Alciné and a friend as "gorillas". Alciné posted the screenshot: "Google Photos, y'all fucked up. My friend's not a gorilla."

Yonatan Zunger, Google's chief architect of social, replied to Alciné directly and attributed the error to obscured faces and "different contrast processing needed for different skin tones and lighting". He added that Google "used to have a problem with people (of all races) being tagged as dogs, for similar reasons", and said longer-term fixes were underway covering both linguistics ("words to be careful about in photos of people") and recognition of dark-skinned faces. A spokeswoman told the BBC the company was "appalled and genuinely sorry". Google was not the only one: a month earlier Flickr's auto-tagger had labelled images of black people "ape" and "animal", and pictures of concentration camps "sport" and "jungle gym". Earlier in 2015, Google Maps searches for racist terms returned the White House.