Google bans gorillas to stop ‘racist’ photos

Google has stopped automatically identifying photos of gorillas to prevent images of black people being ‘tagged’ as the animal.

It follows a PR disaster in 2015 when Google Photos’ algorithms identified a photo of a black software developer and his friend as ‘gorillas’ (see screenshot). The outraged developer posted it on Twitter, causing huge embarrassment to the company.

Google quickly apologised, saying it was “was appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened”. The company said it would take “immediate action” to stop the error recurring.

Google’s solution was recently highlighted by Wired magazine, which uploaded 40,000 photos of primates to Google Photos.

The magazine then searched for the animals, finding photos of baboons, gibbons, orangutans and marmosets, but not of gorillas, chimpanzees and monkeys. These animals could be found only by using related search terms such as ‘zoo’ and ‘jungle’.

Google responded by confirming that its algorithm won’t tag them no matter how clear the photo is. It said: “Image labelling technology is still early and unfortunately it’s nowhere near perfect”.

The company’s failure to develop a more sophisticated solution underlines how difficult it is for computers to identify photos to an acceptable level of accuracy. Although great strides have been made recently, software still lacks the ability to use a human-like common sense.

Other photo programs have a similar problem. In 2015, Flickr (owned by Yahoo) tagged photos of black men and white women as ‘apes’. It appears that Flickr has since removed the word from its tagging system.