Last June 29, Daniel Howley, a technology reporter of Yahoo, filed a story about a picture of African-Americans that was categorized as "Gorillas" by Google Photos, the search engine's image recognition system.
According to the story, Jacky Alcine, 21, a programmer from Brooklyn, had logged into his Google account and was browsing through images from Google Photos when he discovered a picture of himself and a friend, taken in 2013, that had been classified into a folder titled "Gorillas" because of a glitch in the image identification software. He was shocked.
The Brooklyn resident then posted a snapshot of the anomaly on Twitter. The post immediately caught the attention of the public, including Google executives.
Upon receiving the complaint, Google issued an official apology. A Google representative touched base with Yahoo Tech and said: "We're appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened."
The representative added: "We are taking immediate action to prevent this type of result from appearing. There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labeling, and we're looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future."
Google developers were also quick to address the problem. Yonatan Zunger, Google's Chief Social Architect, got in touch with Alcine through Twitter and asked if the programmer could give him access to the account in order to assess what went wrong. The problem was reportedly fixed a few hours later.
However, even after the fix, Alcine still found glitches in the Google photo classification system and noted that the picture was still tagged as gorillas and registered as a result when searching for the keyword "chimp."
"This could have been avoided with a more accurate and complete classification of black-skinned people, especially people of darker-toned color like myself and my friend," he said.
