Google says sorry for racist auto-tag in photo app

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. 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).