Google fixed ‘racist’ Photos app by binning gorillas from auto-tagging feature, after black developer was incorrectly marked as an ape
The tech giant has tried to stop black people from being tagged as gorillas in the Google Photos app with a dumb workaround that stops tagging tech from working correctly
GOOGLE has fixed a problem with its Photos app that saw black people tagged as "gorillas" – by simply removing gorillas from the rogue algorithm altogether.
The ham-fisted solution means people taking photos of actual gorillas will no longer have their snaps categorised correctly.
Back in 2015, the Google Photos app was slammed by some as "racist" after a a serious tagging failure was posted to Twitter.
A black software developer shared an image that showed how Google Photos had tagged photos of him with a black friend as "gorillas".
"Google Photos, y'all f**ked up. My friend's not a gorilla," wrote Jacky Alciné.
It turns out that Google has completely scrapped gorilla tagging from the Photos app.
The tech site uploaded tens of thousands of photos of primates to Photos.
It found that baboons, gibbons, and marmosets were accurately identified and tagged.
But it emerged that gorillas and chimpanzees weren't being recognised at all.
The site also revealed that searching for "black woman" or "black man" wouldn't identify people by race, but clothing.
A spokesperson for Google told Wired that Alciné's tweet prompted the search engine giant to block the terms "gorilla", "chimp", "chimpanzee", and "monkey" as Google Photos tags.
This means that Google's algorithm won't correctly tag any of these primates, no matter how clear the image is.
It's possible that Google has developed a smarter fix, but the risks of repeating the 2015 gorilla incident are too high.