Google's solution to accidental algorithmic racism: ban gorillas

After Google was criticised in 2015 for an image-recognition algorithm that auto-tagged pictures of black people as "gorillas", the company promised "immediate action" to prevent any repetition of the error. That action was simply to prevent Google Photos from ever labelling any image as a gorilla, chimpanzee, or monkey – even pictures of the primates themselves. That's the conclusion drawn by Wired magazine, which tested more than 40,000 images of animals on the service. Photos accurately tagged images of pandas and poodles, but consistently returned no results for the great apes and monkeys – despite accurately finding baboons, gibbons and orangutans. Google confirmed that the terms were removed from searches and image tags as a direct result of the 2015 incident, telling the magazine that: "Image labelling technology is still early and unfortunately it's nowhere near perfect".