Last Sunday, Jacky Alciné, who works in the Big Apple as a web developer, tweeted a picture of himself and a friend. The image-recognition feature in Google's Photos app labelled it, errr, "Gorillas".
Oopsie! Google bad! Imagine labelling people with dark skin in that horribly racist way! But see, this is a new app, a new technology, and it's still got some bugs in it. In fact, it's been widely mocked online for many other misidentifications.
The tweet quickly prompted an apology from Google, which released a statement saying the company is "appalled and genuinely sorry" about the label. After attempting to fix the algorithm, they decided to temporarily remove the gorilla label, including the application's ability to search for gorillas.
"There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labeling," they added, "and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future."
Click here to read the full story in the New York Times.
Note from Ed.: Walt is to be commended for his considerable restraint in not testing the app to see if it can recognize a certain Canadian hockey player.
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