Google is now under quite a controversial spotlight after the company tried fixing its seemingly racist photo recognition app, Google Photos, only to end up banning the word and term "Gorilla."
This was after an African-American man named Jacky Alcine noticed that his photo album with his black friends was tagged as "Gorillas" by the Google photo app back in 2015. Three years later, Google has claimed to have "fixed" the issue by simply removing the auto-tag term "Gorilla" from its algorithm. Unfortunately for the company, this enraged a lot of users even more.
Some users even took to Twitter to rant about Google's lazy fix for the issue, where one of them even stated that the company could have developed a more diverse and intelligent algorithm instead of just banning the identification of Gorillas and black people.
Apparently, this also was not an isolated case, where reporters from Wired even tested Google Photos with approximately 40,000 images, the majority of which contained animals. The test results were quite accurate, and the app recognized which animal is which save for a small group of primates, which include Gorillas, chimpanzees, or monkeys.
In Google's defense, a spokesperson has claimed that its image recognition technology was still at its early stages and nowhere near perfect. This means there might still be a lot which needs to be done in order for the app to fully recognize the distinction between apes and some people.
For now, they seem to have just improvised by removing "Gorilla" from the recognition term. That said, this fix also bars the recognition of black people, meaning they will also not be labelled in the photo app. Thus, one feature cannot be had without the dysfunctional other.
The company has also admitted that it is now currently working on a more long-term fix for the issue, but users will have to make do with the temporary fix for now.
