Posted on 04/09/2016 4:08:58 AM PDT by marthemaria
Google Photos labelled a picture of two black people as ‘gorillas’ Google Maps and Flickr have also suffered from race-related problems Google has apologized after its new photo app labelled two black people as “gorillas”.
The photo service, launched in May, automatically tags uploaded pictures using its own artificial intelligence software.
“Google Photos, y’all fucked up. My friend’s not a gorilla,” Jacky Alciné tweeted on Sunday after a photo of him and a friend was mislabelled as “gorillas” by the app.
Shortly after, Alciné was contacted by Yonatan Zunger, the chief architect of social at Google.
“Big thanks for helping us fix this: it makes a real difference,” Zunger tweeted to Alciné.
He went on to say that problems in image recognition can be caused by obscured faces and “different contrast processing needed for different skin tones and lighting”.
“We used to have a problem with people (of all races) being tagged as dogs, for similar reasons,” he said. “We’re also working on longer-term fixes around both linguistics (words to be careful about in photos of people) and image recognition itself (e.g., better recognition of dark-skinned faces). Lots of work being done and lots still to be done, but we’re very much on it.”
Racist tags have also been a problem in Google Maps. Earlier this year, searches for “nigger house” globally and searches for “nigger king” in Washington DC turned up results for the White House, the residence of the US president, Barack Obama. Both at that time and earlier this week, Google apologized and said that it was working to fix the issue.
“We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened,” a Google spokeswoman told the BBC on Wednesday.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
This sure sounds familiar, old story, or it has hapened a second time? Can you imagine the extended outcry if the Koch Brothers ran Google
At least it didn’t get the confused as “trunk monkeys”...
Well the very reason that the racial slur arose of calling blacks “gorillas” is that certain subsets of African blacks actually do have facial features that are similar to gorillas (large nose, thick brow, large jaw). The analysis and identification routines in this photo software is just identifying those same similarities and making a “guess” based on those features.
I don’t know if this is irony or anything (I am probably being silly here), but I was just reading Randy West’s book on Johnny Olson and the chapter on the popularity of early radio shows, namely “Amos ‘n’ Andy”. According to the book, the show used neither pointed racial slurs nor direct racial humour in both it’s radio and television incarnations, yet it was shunned and episode filmcans mothballed by the mid 1960s due to outcry from the NAACP and related organizations due to alleged racial stereotypes.
It’s kind of strange to read about Google getting into this sort of trouble nowadays.
large nose, thick brow, large jaw).
Michelle Obama comes to mind. Also add big haunches.
Yes, yes but Google’s best friend is black!
Do a Google image search for “british white couple”; I bet they won’t fix that.
Rovian job title
Out of the mouths of microprocessors ...
LOL
Many have speculated what future artificial intelligence might look like—we are beginning to get early hints and they are not what people expect.
Google has opened up the Pandora’s box...
What if they really are gorillas?
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