Google Photos mislabels black Americans as 'gorillas'
Google Photos automatically labelled Black people as 'gorillas', prompting disgust and accusations of racial and ethnic stereotyping. The discovery was made by programmer Jacky Alcine, who discovered that a folder named 'Gorillas' had been automatically generated in his Google Photos account. The folder contained photographs of Alcine and a Black friend. Alcine alerted Google to the problem, which quickly apologised and promised 'immediate action' to resolve the issue, which was thought likely to have involved the poor classification of image training data. ➕ January 2018. WIRED discovered that Google had prevented Google Photos from labelling images as a gorilla, chimpanzee or monkey, including pictures of the primates themselves. Despite major advances in image recognition, Google Photos - and Apple Photos - failed to find any images with the images, according to a 2023 New York Times report. System 🤖 Google Photos 🔗 Operator: Alphabet/Google Developer: Alphabet/Google Country: USA Sector: Media/entertainment/sports/arts Purpose: Improve photo labelling, discovery Technology: Image recognition Issue: Bias/discrimination
- Date it happened
- 2015-07-01
- Organisation involved
- Product, system or model
- Google Photos
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