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Google apologizes for photo app that tagged black couple as 'gorillas'

By Tomas Monzon

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., July 1 (UPI) -- Google has apologized for its Photos app's inappropriate auto-categorization of a black couple as "gorillas".

Chief Architect of Social at Google, Yonatan Zunger, quickly followed up to an angry Twitter post by New York computer programmer Jacky Alcine on Sunday that showed a screenshot of Google's Photos app automatically categorizing pictures of him and a black woman as "gorillas."

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Zunger and a Google team accessed Alcine's account with his permission and developed a fix for the problem, which went live on June 29. The team's quick action earned Alcine's appreciation.

Zunger explained that "lots of work" is being done in the "linguistics and image recognition" components of Google's software.

"But we're very much on it," Zunger added.

Users have the ability to improve the software's automatic categorization by telling it which tags are incorrect – a method dubbed machine learning. In May, a reviewer reported that pictures of his dogs had been tagged as pictures of horses.

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Google Photos' glitches are among the bugs as software tasked with image recognition continues to advance. In 2010, some HP webcams failed to track dark-skinned faces. The same year, a Nikon Coolpix S630 identified an Asian woman's smiling face as the indication that the subject of the frame had blinked. In May, photo sharing website Flickr identified a black man and a white woman as apes.

The glitches may be related to the way algorithms for face detection work. Shapes, colors and patterns are used to make educated guesses as to what a given picture contains. While this technique works well for inanimate objects or landmarks, it falls short for facial detection of certain individuals.

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