Google Apologises For Photos App's Racist Blunder

Mark Wilson writes: Google has issued an apology after the automatic tagging feature of its Photos apps labeled a black couple as "gorillas". This is not the first time an algorithm has been found to have caused racial upset. Earlier in the year Flickr came under fire after its system tagged images of concentration camps as sports venues and black people as apes. The company was criticized on social networks after a New York software developer questioned the efficacy of Google's algorithm. Accused of racism, Google said that it was "appalled" by what had happened, branding it as "100% not OK".

Comments

I know how this is going to be fixed...

[CajunArson]

Anything that's politically incorrect will be blacklisted from being labeled as a result. No more gorrillas or any other of a million and one potentially offensive labels!

Although gorillas might be labeled as people, which would actually make some SJWs happy.

Re:I know how this is going to be fixed...

[TsuruchiBrian]

Their algorithm incorrectly identified one member of the Homininae family (gorillas) with another member (humans) sharing at least 95% of the same DNA. Yeah they are fucking idiots. How well does your algorithm work?

Re:I know how this is going to be fixed...

[Hevel-Varik]

No your comment is sad. Go and view the tagged pictures. And tell me that there is no similarity. Your lying or have so deeply fooled yourself that you have difficulty thinking un-good thoughts.

Amazing, modern man believes man descended from apes and when a computer algorithm mistakes a black colored and ape shaped ape descendant for, you know, an ape, it's because the photo alg guys are a bunch of frat boys.

It's sad the world is bending over backwards affecting this total bullshit 'how COULD this happen!!!!,' though really it isn't the world. It's media and blog bubble who are encouraged, nay, validated! by the corporate "This. Is. 100% not. ok" but show the pic and explain the story off-line and see how normal mankind really still is.

alogrithms aren't racist

[Anonymous Coward]

Alogorithms aren't racist, and teaching a computer to visually recognize objects is hard. Move along.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[jellomizer]

I followed the link and looked at the photos. I could see how it would make that mistake.
1. The Color balance was off: What we call black people are actually just a richer brown. the color balance gave their color more of a real Black/Gray color, the natural color of a Gorilla.

2. The Angle of the shot. The tilted Angle makes it appeared that they are not upright but slouching in.

3. They were making unnatural facial features for humans. They were making funny faces at the camera.

4. The dark hue of the gentleman who was behind shirt, combined with the ladies hair style, makes it seem the body with much broader shoulder.

I expect the combination of a lot of factors created the wrong choice. But computer decision making, while getting good, isn't perfect, but it is often better then not having it because then it wouldn't be possible to catalog the millions of images. We need to accept that computers make mistakes and there should be a way to fix them when they are found.

Many of our derogatory comments come from the fact that we find similarities with something else, so it come to reason that a computer may make an actual mistake that will reinforce such derogatory meaning.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[Fwipp]

But the people writing the algorithm and choosing the input data *can* be racist. And even in the absence of malice, you can create racist outcomes.

If your training set has many photos of white people and few photos of black people, it's not going to be great at recognizing black people. If it doesn't know what black people look like, it's bound to misclassify them more often than white people.

Anecdotally, I noticed that the Microsoft "how old are you" site a while back recognized me (a white person) in every picture, but only detected my (black) partner in about a third of the pictures I fed it. In one instance, in a screenshot of a video chat, it recognized my little 100x100 picture in the bottom right, but failed to detect my partner's face in the center.

Your real-world performance can only be as good as your test/training data.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[Whiteox]

OTOH If it was a pic of a gorilla but labelled 'Black Afro-American' then you would have the same issue.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[Crashmarik]

But the people writing the algorithm and choosing the input data *can* be racist.

Call the grand scrutinizer and ready the scourges.

And even in the absence of malice, you can create racist outcomes.

The universe didn't agree with a totalitarian's philosophy.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[chipschap]

I find it hard to believe that there was racism intended in any way, shape, or form. It is unfortunate that this took place but Google certainly took care of the problem in short order, as is right.

There are too many of the LBTO (looking to be offended) crowd these days. Come on, there are plenty of real problems with racism, there's no need to label inadvertent and unintentional things.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[flopsquad]

Alogorithms aren't racist, and teaching a computer to visually recognize objects is hard. Move along.

Oblig Better Off Ted

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[johanw]

The algorithm wasn't that far off. I'm sure the gorilla will come over it.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[lq_x_pl]

It isn't a racist outcome. It is the outcome of a flawed algorithm. Might even be able to argue that wider testing (and improvement) is needed for the image sensors for computer-attached video equipment. If I my own photo albums for "seal" or "dog" I get pictures of my kids in both. I don't believe the algorithm is impugning the humanity of my offspring, I just think it is far-from-perfect. The outcomes of my search aren't hateful. The outcomes of the picture labels in this story aren't racist.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[Copid]

The developers building vision algorithms don't typically create their own datasets. They purchase archives of images, and a lot of these problems stem from how many samples of each type are in those archives. The Google team likely has a giant database of human faces that it works with, and the ethnic frequencies are probably either the result of choices made by whatever origanization compiled it (and for whatever reason they compiled it) or the ethnic breakdown of the userbase of some app they used to grab the data. It's extremely unlikely that either of those will produce the same number of samples of every ethnic type.

It's also one thing if this was a program just designed to distinguish between different people. But it looks like it's trying to recognize objects of all sorts and distinguish between people and just about everything else. That's a hard problem, and the only response to this sort o thing is to take a regular failure case and feed it back into the training data so you can hit the next regular failure case. Hopefully it will be less coincidentally embarrassing, but it will definitely be there. Perhaps confusing bald men with balloons or something like that.

But I also think people underestimate how much skin color affects machine vision problems. I spent years in the biometrics industry and one consistent fact is that people with darker skin just don't provide as much easy-to-recognize detail as people with lighter skin. There will be more misclassifications as long as the image is taken using the visible spectrum. To a computer extracting features, dark skinned people and gorillas are both human-ish face shapes with a particular color range and somewhat indistinct geometry due to weak contrast and shadows. Distingushing between those two sets just isn't as easy as distinguishing between fair-skinned blondes and gorillas. You can make that decision just by looking at the color histograms and not even bothering with geometry.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[ScentCone]

It isn't a racist outcome. It is the outcome of a flawed algorithm.

You're not paying attention. These days, outcomes that have nothing to do with intention, purpose, or simple transparent standards, but which happen to lean statistically towards results not in perfect balance with skin color as a function of population (though, only in one direction) ... the process must be considered racist. The whole "disparate impact" line of thinking is based on this. If you apply a standard (say, physical strength or attention to detail or quick problem solving, whatever) to people applying to work as, say, firefighters ... if (REGARDLESS of the mix of people who apply) you get more white people getting the jobs, then the standards must surely be racist, even if nobody can point to a single feature of those standards that can be identified as such. Outcomes now retro-actively re-invent the character of whoever sets a standard, and finds them to be a racist. Never mind that holding some particular group, based on their skin color, to some LOWER standard is actually racist, and incredibly condescending. But too bad: outcomes dictate racist-ness now, not policies, actions, purpose, motivation, or objective standards.

So, yeah. The algorithm, without having a single "racist" feature to it, can still be considered racist. Because that pleases the Big SJW industry.

It's the same thinking that says black people aren't smart enough to get a free photo ID from their state, and so laws requiring people to prove who they are when they're casting votes for the people who will govern all of us are, of course, labeled as racist by SJW's sitting in their Outrage Seminar meetings. It's hard to believe things have come that far, but they have.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[TsuruchiBrian]

We should throw in some white colored apes that google can mistake for white people, and then it will be fair, and everyone can stop being outraged.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[bill_mcgonigle]

I don't believe the algorithm is impugning the humanity of my offspring, I just think it is far-from-perfect.

But is the algorithm even wrong? I think the question to the Google recognizer is "of the images in my collection which ones look most like a seal"? If the collection is mostly all pictures of your kids, it'll show you the pictures of your kids that it thinks have the most in common with what it has as an idea about what seals look like. This isn't to make fun of your kids, of course, it's just its best guess due to the nature of the question that was asked of it. A human could make a similar selection when posed with the same question.

So as to the point of TFA, the searcher asked Google for the pictures that are most likely to be pictures of a gorilla inside his photo collection. If we assume that there were not actual pictures of gorillas in the collection, then the guess might not be a bad one. If you gave any human a set of pictures of a speedboat, a skyscraper, a turtle, a box of cereal, and a woman, and asked the human which one of those things looks most like a gorilla, there's only one truthful answer. It might be an offensive one to some people but that doesn't make the guess mathematically incorrect.

Reading the Twitter stream, Google has decided to censor such results. Their first attempt was to say "if somebody searches for gorilla and it matches a picture with a face in it, don't show that". That failed on two pics where a face wasn't recognized, so they added even more filtering and now they're building an i18n wordlist of "offensive" words to restrict the algorithm's output depending on locale.

Being a for-profit company, one of Google's primary concerns is to not alienate its users, so for them I'm sure it's the right move. But we need to be aware that it is imposing censorship (on itself) and that the output of the algorithm is becoming less useful to some degree to avoid offending some people. It's their trade-off to make, for sure, but for the larger computing community it's a valuable lesson to keep in mind. Such trade-offs need to be made carefully and consciously.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[TsuruchiBrian]

I don't disagree with the idea of preventing voter fraud nor government issued ID's as the tool to accomplish that task. That said it is pretty obvious that the main proponents of voter laws are Republicans because they know it will benefit them in elections, and the main opponents of voter laws are democrats because they know it will not benefit them in elections. Neither side cares about fairness, they only care about winning.

If voter fraud were a big problem, I think the disparity in outcome would not trump the need for legitimacy. But the gap in number of democrats without photo ID's vs republicans without photo ID's suggests that democrats will lose way more votes from voter ID laws than anything close the the amount of voter fraud going on.

It's not that democrats can't get free state ID's, it's that we can be sure that some % of everyone without IDs will fail to get them before the election, and the democrats have a much larger pool of people that can potentially fall into this category.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[ScentCone]

That said it is pretty obvious that the main proponents of voter laws are Republicans because they know it will benefit them in elections, and the main opponents of voter laws are democrats because they know it will not benefit them in elections.

Backwards. The Republicans know that the biggest source of bogus voter registrations, and the areas with the largest number of actively dead registered voters and turnout at polling places where the number of votes exceeds the eligible population, are in places where Democrat activists work the hardest to hold on to power. It's not that knowing people who vote are voting legally and only once isn't going to benefit Democrats, it's that such a process is counter to what liberal activist groups work so hard to put in place. Like huge efforts to get college students to register to vote where they go to school, but to also vote absentee in their home state. Stuff like that. When they pour so much work into it that it starts to show (like the thousands of bogus registrations routinely created by the former ACORN), you know they won't like having that work undone by basic truth-telling at the polling place.

If you're worried about people not knowing there's an election coming up, and not bothering to get an ID (really? you can't go to the doctor, fill a prescription, collect a welfare check, or much of ANYTHING else with already having an ID), then why not encourage the Democrats to apply the same level of effort they put into the shady practices described above, and focus it instead on getting that rare person who never sees a doctor, never gets a prescription, collects no government benefits of any kind, doesn't work (but whom you seem to suggest none the less are a large voting block) and, with YEARS to work with between elections ... just getting them an ID?

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[TranquilVoid]

Alogorithms aren't racist

FacialRegion *face = DetectFace(bmp);
if (face != nullptr)
{
      if (face->avg_col.r < 10 && face->avg_col.g < 10 && face->avg_col.b < 10)
      {
            / / Be racist
            result->order = ordPrimate;
            result->genus = genGorilla;
      }
      else
      {
            / / Be homophobic
            result->order = ordPrimate;
            result->genus = genHomo;
      }

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[TsuruchiBrian]

If you're worried about people not knowing there's an election coming up, and not bothering to get an ID (really? you can't go to the doctor, fill a prescription, collect a welfare check, or much of ANYTHING else with already having an ID),

I'm not worried because I'm not a democrat, and don't have any interest in helping democrats win elections.

What I am saying is that voter fraud is currently not a problem. There just aren't significant number of fraudulent votes. It is pretty clear that the problem is inflated by republican politicians and strategists to get voter ID laws to help them win elections.

then why not encourage the Democrats to apply the same level of effort they put into the shady practices described above, and focus it instead on getting that rare person who never sees a doctor, never gets a prescription, collects no government benefits of any kind, doesn't work (but whom you seem to suggest none the less are a large voting block) and, with YEARS to work with between elections ... just getting them an ID?

I'm not saying it's hard to get an ID. I'm saying that t will result in less votes for democrats, and everyone knows that. The republicans know it and the democrats know that, and that's all both parties care about.

If the situation were flipped, and there was a law to change voting registration to be done on instagram or twitter or something, then you'd have republicans fighting it and democrats pushing it. Neither party gives a damn about fairness.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[meta-monkey]

To be fair, if your first C program is:

#include<racist_version_of_stdio.h>

main()
{
        printf("Hello World, but only if you're white!");
}

Then yeah helloworld.c can be pretty fucking racist.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[dywolf]

the only person saying "black people aren't smart enough" is you.

Over here we live in reality, and the reality I that getting one of those IDs requires taking time off from work that we frequently either don't get or can't afford to take. It also frequently requires traveling clear cross town, when you don't have reliable personal transportation, and live in towns that lack adequate public transportation. Or dealings with the fact that some states (*cough*Georgia*) have been intentionally shutting down DMV's offices (as well as polling stations for actual election day) in minority parts of town, and making it even harder.

Or consider Texas where it's a literal 6 hour drive for people in some regions of the state to reach an ID issuing authority.

You are a troll.
You are a racist.
And you are ignorant.
Your history shows it.
Though flinging SJW like it's a epithet is also a pretty good indicator.

Voter fraud is a literal non issue, a nonthreat to the integrity of the election process, but even if wanting to get the process from 99.999% to 100% integrity was a worthy goal, there's the bothersome fact that IDs do NOTHING prevent the largest sources of fraud. All they do is make it harder for large segments of population to vote, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of people in order to stop a few dozen cases of in person fraud, the single most inefficient, ineffective, and most minor form of voter fraud. That fact that you idiots focus solely on Voter ID reveals your "commitment to election integrity" for the lie it is.

The fact it hampers many people, particularly people who might vote against you, isn't merely an unfortunate bug, it's a goddamn feature, and the entire intent.

Re:alogrithms aren't racist

[ScentCone]

Over here we live in reality, and the reality I that getting one of those IDs requires taking time off from work that we frequently either don't get or can't afford to take

Really. What sort of job do you have that didn't involve showing ID in order to submit the required federal tax forms as you were hired? What sort of paycheck are you getting that doesn't involve you using an ID in order to open a bank account or cash a check? Please be specific about the people who are working full time, so hard, that not once in their entire life can they be bothered to get a form of ID. And, out of curiosity, how on earth did they find time to go register to vote, or find time TO vote? You're saying that these are people who will have their routine trips to the polling place, year after year throughout their entire lives, thwarted because they couldn't take five minutes to stop once for a free ID?

Voter fraud is a literal non issue, a nonthreat to the integrity of the election process

So, you're asserting that there are no elections that turn on a matter of just a handful of votes? You're actually going to say that the many local and state elections (which do things like put congressional and senate representatives into power) don't sometimes get decided by only dozens of votes? And then you're going to assert that papers like the Washington Post, who have reported on elections as recently as 2012 where in just one local review there were instances of local voters fraudulently voting twice ... that, what, the Washington Post is lying? Is that because you think the WP is part of some vast, racists, right-wing conspiracy, and manufactured the records that were produced by the election officials, showing the felony-offense fraud?

Your anxious need to trot out the ad hominem shows how much you're aware that you're BS-ing, so I don't really need to go on. You know you're looking to defend fraudulent practices that primarily favor the one party whose activists have been caught red-handed generating tens of thousands of bogus voter registrations. And you're complaining about the person who suggests it's a good ID to make fraud harder to commit. Your opening comments about how difficult it is for full time workers to stop and get an ID that the already have to have was hilarious, though, so thanks for the entertainment.

Casper is Concerned

[eyepeepackets]

So, do really pale "white" people get mis-labeled as ghosts? Inquiring minds are somewhat concerned because they are rather pale....

Re:Casper is Concerned

[eth1]

So, do really pale "white" people get mis-labeled as ghosts? Inquiring minds are somewhat concerned because they are rather pale....

One of the articles I saw about this mentioned that in the past, light-skinned people had been identified as dogs and seals. Strangely, there was no outrage about that.

Re:Casper is Concerned

[war4peace]

Searched for "dog" in my Google Photos. 6 photos came up, all of my kids or kid and wife. I don't care. It's an algorithm.
Searched for "seal" in my Google Photos. Only one came up, and it's of my elder kid. I don't care. It's an algorithm.
People who feel "offended" by an algorithm are batshit crazy.

Re:Casper is Concerned

[AmiMoJo]

Historically racists have called black people apes and monkeys. Therefore this accidentally and somewhat embarrassingly mimics that behaviour.

Historically white people were not, to my knowledge, insulted and discriminated against by being compared to seals and dogs. It's a bit more embarrassing to have women labeled as dogs because they are sometimes called bitches as an insult.

It's really not hard to understand. Context and history attach additional meanings and sentiments to some words.

Re:Casper is Concerned

[ShaunC]

Therefore this accidentally and somewhat embarrassingly mimics that behaviour.

You mean apes that behaviour?

Re:Casper is Concerned

[war4peace]

Could you please elaborate on the "painful part" thing? Mind, you, I'm Romanian and might not fully understand what's happening, but I am interacting with people from the States on a daily basis and have quite a few good friends there (Americans, that is). My conversations with them on the "blacks" subject prompted me to draw these conclusions (which might be correct or incorrect):
- "Positive discrimination" is prevalent. Black people have grown to abuse it, hence "Because I'm black!" which is used as an argument way more times than it should.
- Feeling of entitlement ("But-but-but the PAST!"). Black people pedal on this past like there's no tomorrow.

I mean, c'mon, we here in Romania have a large minority of Gypsies. 10% of all population, officially, but unofficially they make 15-17% most likely. There are huge similarities between them and the black population in the States, including slavery in the past. But they don't pedal on positive discrimination (they can't there isn't any) and never say "because I'm a Gypsy!" because nobody cares.

If a Gypsy would search his Google Photos and see matches for "crow" (which is what we use in Romania as the N word), he would laugh and shrug it off, without knowing what an algorithm is.

It's an algorithm

[guruevi]

It's impressive that it can even recognize and classify things as such. Great apes and humans share about 99% of our DNA, any 'alien' entity would classify us amongst the apes.

The fact that black people are black and thus have a closer resemblance to the generally 'darker' great apes is not racist because an algorithm that is not programmed to have biases cannot be racist. It's just peoples interpretation of the facts that makes things 'racist'. Superficially, black people and apes look mathematically more alike than white people and apes. If the thing was trained on albino apes (which do exist), white people would be considered apes AND NOBODY WOULD THINK IT WAS RACIST.

Re: It's an algorithm

[imgod2u]

One could point out that there are fewer instances of white males being miscategorized. I suspect this has less to do with any actual racism and more to do with the fact that the people who developed the algorithm are likely predominantly white males and they tend to first test the algorithm on their own collection of photos or those in their circle.

This is an argument for a more diverse workforce...

Re: It's an algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an argument for more QA testing

Re:It's an algorithm

[LWATCDR]

Actually I am impressed that it did see how similar Apes and people are. Honestly people getting upset over it are just a bit silly. The problem is people think that someone put person_of_african_descent == ape in the code and that is not true. The algorithm just confused one great ape with an expressive face with another. It is no more racist or intentional than the same system confusing a Camaro with a Firebird.
 

Re:It's an algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, if a 4 year old had pointed out the same thing we'd regard it as incorrect and then calmly correct for the real interpretation. That's not racism, that's "learning". We should regard this engine as if it were a small child and see that it's "learning". The only analog of this response I can see is when we blame the parents for perceived racism. It's the drawback of learning on the world-stage, under the scrutiny of every man, woman, dog, goat and goldfish on the planet. Living under the political correctness rules of the whole planet is rather debilitating, there's a lot of people with pitchforks already pre-sharpened for such things.

We, as a race, really need to dial down the offensive-radar. Everything is offensive to someone, somewhere. That doesn't mean all human progress should stop just in case someone gets a bit butt-hurt. Deal with it. It's a learning computer and it's still learning. It'll get there eventually. Just remember you were 1 year old and shitting your pants at one point. You don't have to poke fun at 1 years olds for shitting themselves. Nor should we find said shit "offensive".

Re: It's an algorithm

[buybuydandavis]

One could point out that there are fewer instances of white males being miscategorized. I suspect this has less to do with any actual racism and more to do with the fact that the people who developed the algorithm are likely predominantly white males and they tend to first test the algorithm on their own collection of photos or those in their circle.

This is an argument for a more diverse workforce...

Yeah, because I bet that's how Google develops their image recognition algorithms - white guys walk around taking pictures of themselves.

As is more likely the case, there are few pictures of Albino gorillas in their machine learning corpus (racist against Albino gorillas!), and hence less data for white folks to more easily match gorillas based on macro level color characteristics.

Re: It's an algorithm

[sexconker]

Testing, let alone QA testing or MORE testing, is NOT the Google way.

Re:It's an algorithm

[edawstwin]

But it is racist because the Republicans that run Google, like Republicans in general, use the term ape as a racist term. They're the ones that decided to do this. It was premeditated decades ago by their kind.

Living in the Southeast USA, I'm exposed to many Republicans. Basically my entire family, extended family, and at least half of my friends and co-workers are Republican. I have never heard any of them use the term "ape" to describe a black person. Some are mildly prejudiced, but none are bigots or racists. I've known a few bigots (likely what you think of as racists) in my life and they have invariably been Democrats, probably due to the lingering legacy of the Dixiecrats from decades ago. I'm not saying that all Democrats everywhere are bigots or that all racially motivated bigots are Democrats, because blanket statements like yours are rarely even remotely true.

Re: It's an algorithm

[Sardaukar86]

This is an argument for a more diverse workforce...

You're right, the best thing for black people would be to replace otherwise functional employees with people who didn't make the grade but happen to be black.

I love the way you "Diversity, Diversity" types are actually incredibly condescending and racist. Perhaps that's why you types perceive "racism" in nearly everything.

In over news

[oobayly]

Google's algorithm also identified photos of some sunburnt Essex chavettes on the beach as Yorkshire pigs. A Google spokesperson said "no apology if necessary - it's an accurate assessment".

AI has come a long way

[Anonymous Coward]

Yonatan Zunger, Google’s chief architect of social: "Machine learning is hard" Now tell us more about them self-driving cars.

"Software" has no opinions of race.

[pla]

Software doesn't hate black people. Software doesn't dislike Islam. Software doesn't think kids these days need to pull their damned pants up and stop playing that crap music too loudly.

Apologizing for a program miscategorizing an image it has never seen before as somehow "racist" makes about as much sense as GE apologizing because my toaster looks like a frowny-face from just the right angle.

Yes, Virginia, we've taken this shit too far.

Re:"Software" has no opinions of race.

[turp182]

Actually, apologizing makes sense in this case. It's not about being at fault (they are not), but common courtesy.

Early in our marriage, my wife taught me to say "I'm sorry" when those around me were hurt or bothered, to be a nice person. Prior to that I only said it if I was at fault.

So if someone spills soda on their shirt, then "I'm sorry". Same for Google, it is the decent thing to do.

Regarding photo identification, Google should have images of the Confederate flag show up in the category "Racist"...

 

that's right

[Anonymous Coward]

And as Richard Dawkins has said, we ARE apes - all of us humans.

Re:Accepting Responsibility

[bluefoxlucid]

...NO IT ISN'T, YOU ASSFACE!

Let's see, we'll do this completely-innocent thing, which is hard, but helps society. Suddenly, hard thing does some harmless,amusing, not-entirely-predicted thing, and people whine about it. OMG, LET'S LEGITIMIZE THEIR STUPIDITY AS A VALID OPINION!

No, you're admitting fault here for something that is NOT YOUR FAULT. You're admitting bad behavior and bad decisions for something that was good behavior and good decision-making, but produced a bad outcome.

THIS IS WHY WE HAVE SHIT SCHOOL SYSTEMS!!! If we have 60% success rate and improve the school system by broad, visible measures to give a better education and improve to an 85% success rate, 15% OF PEOPLE WILL CRY THAT OUR NEW EDUCATION SYSTEM FUCKED OVER THEIR KIDS! Someone will point to all the failures, create a collage, and claim we're totally incompetent!

The appropriate response to bitchwhining about this non-issue is to tell people to stop fucking whining.

Re:Accepting Responsibility

[greenfruitsalad]

there's no issue. just a hissy fit thrown by a guy who has heard this expression addressed at him/his friends in a negative manner in the past (understandable). i mean, just look at the faces the girl in those pictures is making... isn't gorilla the first thing you think of?

what's next? are we going to pretend a closeup of a bald patch doesn't look like a billiard ball? or that asians don't look like they're winking in photos? or that dwarves in funny hats don't remind us of garden gnomes? some people just want to get offended and there's nothing we can do about it. i'm surprised google responded to it.

Oh the outrage a non sentient can be racist

[Crashmarik]

What next a hairy fat guy in a pool gets tagged as a walrus ? His girlfriend a whale ?

Oh the horror the machine was mean.

In related news...

[wbr1]

Google announce that it will change the tagging of Caucasians from 'cracker' to 'saltine'.

Re:that's right

[magarity]

"Ape" is a general language term that can be used by different people to specify quite different groups of creatures; it's more correct to say we're all hominids.

How is that racist?

[Anonymous Coward]

That woman does look like a gorilla when she makes faces like that, can't blame the computer that automatically flagged you for that.

Re:Accepting Responsibility

[DigiShaman]

It's part of the cult of PC (Political Correctness) to carry out self-flagellation as a method of atonement.

Re: lol

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is that there are a ton of entitled idiots who believe they have the right to be offended, and gigaton of idiots who chose to oblige. That's why we don't have nice things anymore.

Algorithms don't know how to be PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Black, simian, short dark hair, big lips. Ape.

Re:Accepting Responsibility

[bluefoxlucid]

Atonement for someone else being a whiny little bitch with nothing better to complain about *throws pencils*

Gorillas aren't so bad

[Theovon]

I'm not going to downplay the feeling of insult that the black couple experienced. There is a long history of racism against blacks, referring to them as apes and other things, with the intent of putting them down. In *this* case, it was an accident of a flawed algorithm, but there's some history here that makes that a hot button. For the sake of repairing the effects of racism of the past, we should be careful about how we use racial slurs, even accidentally.

That all being said, we're learning more and more about gorillas and other higher apes and how intelligent they are. We're closely related. To an alien from another planet, they may look at humans and other apes and not perceive much difference. To compare humans (in general) to apes (in general) isn't all that unreasonable. And some day, when all this racism shit is behind us, mistakes like what happened here might be merely amusing.

Re:Accepting Responsibility

[Translation Error]

Hm, so, you're saying if you wrote some software that has undesired, incorrect behavior that could easily be considered deeply insulting and someone told you about it or even-gasp-complained, you'd tell them to stop fucking whining. Oh, and insult anyone who thought an apology for your fuck-up is appropriate.

What a piece of work you are. Just the sort of person I'd want to work with or have designing products. I'm sure that when a bad outcome comes about, despite your behavior and decision-making clearly having been perfect, your response will be polite and professional.

Re: lol

[Vermonter]

You have a right to be offended, just as I have a right to not care.

Prediction

[sootman]

They tweak the algorithm a bit. A week from now, a gorilla in a photo is tagged as 'black person'. Hilarity ensues.

Re:Accepting Responsibility

[bluefoxlucid]

This is kind of like being hit in the arm by a baseball as you are walking by your neighbor's yard.

It's kind of like being hit in the arm by a baseball THAT YOU IMAGINED, BUT WHICH DOESN'T ACTUALLY EXIST, as you are walking by your neighbor's yard.

Re:Accepting Responsibility

[bluefoxlucid]

Hm, so, you're saying if you wrote some software that has undesired, incorrect behavior that could easily be considered deeply insulting and someone told you about it or even-gasp-complained,

I would assume they're ridiculous. There's a difference between, "Oh, that's not quite right" and "OMG LOOK AT THIS HORRID! YOU MUST APOLERGIZE!" This is an unremarkable bug, not a sleight against anyone; an apology has no context, aside from patting someone on the head and placating them for being retards.

I'm sure that when a bad outcome comes about, despite your behavior and decision-making clearly having been perfect, your response will be polite and professional.

It might be, but it won't be an apology. When people start rallying and screaming on my Facebook page because 85% of people who watched Planet of the Apes also watched a Martin Luther King documentary and my auto-recommender paired "Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream" with "Planet of the Apes", I'm of course going to tell them they're all idiots.

Young children generalise too.

[dsmatthews9379]

I know it is hard for many to be rational and factual about some topics but, I have see the same categorisation choices made by young children on more than one occasion. We must be forgiving and understanding toward Google's AI and it's faux pas because it has not received the social conditioning necessary to discriminate politically and override it's simple visual correlation matches. We may also learn something about the deeper causes of xenophobia and politically incorrect behaviour in humans if we consider this topic rationally. We must come full circle from the rational (a match is a match), to the shared social illusion (political correctness) , and back to the rational view (understand the process) in order to understand the phenomena fully. And if Google tells you that the city of Cusco in Peru is gay, please just be wise enough to understand that the AI is young and still learning the complex and ambiguous ways of human society.

Re:that's right

[faway]

Richard Dawkins is a biologist. he would never say something so stupid. we are all hominids, and we are certainly not apes.

Re:Accepting Responsibility

[JaredOfEuropa]

There really is no issue to be downplayed. It's an image recognition algorithm, and it's going to make mistakes. Some hilarious, some embarrasing. But none of it intentional. Unfortunately there will always be people who will see malice in every mistake, and take the slightest affront to whine loudly. If the affront happens to involve any minority, you have a "winner" on your hands in terms of righteous indignation.

An apology is in order, nothing more. And only to the misidentified people, not to the black community at large, Seriously, if the system had identified a white couple as polar bears or Klan members, people would have just laughed.

Re:that's right

[Ramze]

No, "Ape" is a very specific term used to specify members of Hominoidea. It is unfortunate many are ignorant of the meaning of the term and use it improperly to include monkeys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Humans are apes - specifically, great apes. (aka Hominidae aka "hominids"). "Hominids" simply means human-like. It used to mean only humans, then it included other extinct human-like creatures and now it generally includes all hominidae. While "hominid" (or alternatively "great ape") is a more specific term, it is certainly NOT a more correct term, merely the Family of the SuperFamily.

One could say that humans are mammals and it would be no less correct. Humans are animals, chordates, mammals, primates, apes, and also great apes.

It's unfortunate that the Google facial recognition software was not aware that humans don't like being reminded that they are indeed very closely related to other great apes and could easily be confused with gorillas by a non-human intelligence. Our indignance at the notion we're apes that look a lot like gorillas is rather silly -- like zebras being offended at being miscategorized as ordinary horses.

Granted, I understand the racist implication that those flagged erroneously as gorillas are somehow less human than others. Thankfully, the computer isn't racist. It merely wasn't sophisticated enough to discern the difference given the input, the algorithm, and its training.

I'm impressed it figured out the object in the photo was a living thing and got the kingdom, phylum, class, order, superfamily, family and sub-family correct. If it had chosen chimp or bonobo, it would have been even closer.

Heck, check out this comparison of a gorilla baby and a human baby -- no one would have blinked an eye if the software said the gorilla was a human baby.
http://intentblog.com/wp-conte...

Another cute gorilla baby -- a bit older:
http://www.ctvnews.ca/polopoly...

Mod parent down

[SpaceXXX]

This person is using "blacklisted" word. Mod it down.

Re:Accepting Responsibility

[ScentCone]

It's called an "apology" - did you skip that day in kindergarten?

When the apology is a completely over-wrought bit of silly nonsense rendered in response to gleeful press releases from the Big SJW industry (who desperately NEED there to be events like this, whipped hugely out of proportion, in order to have things to get sound angry about), then it's not an apology. It's a forced sacrifice on the alter of Political Correctness gone (ever more) insane. There's nothing to apologize for here, because nobody at Google sat down to create a racist process or racist results. People who can't mentally untangle the difference between intent and coincidence should just shut up ... except, they're all media darlings now, because it's fashionable to be completely irrational on that front, now.

If Google tagged me as "albino ape" or "yeti" or "Stay-Pufft Marshmallow Man" I'd think it was hilarious. Those manufacturing faux offense at this bit of completely benign nonsense are the real racists. They are the ones who are saying that black people aren't smart enough to understand the situation. As usual, the racist SJW condescension is the most actually offensive thing in the room.

Re:Accepting Responsibility

[bondsbw]

It might be, but it won't be an apology.

Unless you are Steve Jobs reincarnate, I doubt this position will get you as far in life.

Re:that's right

[Barefoot Monkey]

Richard Dawkins is a biologist. he would never say something so stupid.

I'm curious what you feel is stupid about that straightforward statement. Regardless, Richard Dawkins did, in fact, say exactly that.
Gaps in the Mind, by Richard Dawkins
"We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes."
"In truth, not only are we apes, we are African apes. The category 'African apes', if you don't arbitrarily exclude humans, is a natural one"
"'Great apes', too, is a natural category only so long as it includes humans. We are great apes."

I did a search for the words "dawkins" and "ape" and the first result was a video of Dawkins saying that he is an ape. I challenge you to find any living biologist that claims otherwise.

we are all hominids, and we are certainly not apes.

Gorillas are hominids, and all hominids are apes. Humans are apes and hominids, just like gorillas.

Re:that's right

[TsuruchiBrian]

Some asshole must have changed wikipedia to make you wrong. It says:

The Hominidae (/hmndi/), also known as great apes,[notes 1] or hominids, form a taxonomic family of primates, including four extant genera: orangutans (Pongo) with two species extant; gorillas (Gorilla) with two species; chimpanzees (Pan) with two species; and humans (Homo) with one species.[1]

You'd better go in there and correct it to say say humans are not apes.

Re:that's right

[Vinegar Joe]

it's more correct to say we're all hominids.

Now we're going from racism to homophobia. Thanks Slashdot!

Re:Could it be the people labelling the training d

[Chrisq]

I think we're looking for racism where there is none. Observing physical characteristics is not racism, and the fact of the matter is that some black people tend to have a more protruding jawline and fuller lips than one would see in a specific group of people who are caucasian. If you compare those two, very specific, physical characteristics with the great ape family, you see similarities.

Now, before anyone starts screaming about how I'm racist (too late), having one or two physical characteristics with another species, out of hundreds of physical characteristics, doesn't mean a damn thing when it comes to humans easily identifying people as not belonging to the same subgroup that shares those characteristics. It's the same reason why we don't think that someone with a striped mohawk is a zebra. We're able to take contextual clues and infer that that person is not, in fact, a zebra.

However, it DOES mean that an algorithm that has been largely trained on either insufficient or faulty data sets can make incorrect inferences based on the characteristics that it has been trained to recognize. If anybody is at fault here, it isn't the algorithm, but whatever engineer fed their image recognition an algorithm so woefully insufficient that it would confuse a human with an ape just based off of a physical characteristic or two out of any number of data points that would indicate, "Hey, this is obviously a human being".

Having done some random searches I agree this is just a mistake - and comparable to others. A few examples that I have found are
- a search for "dolphins" including a picture of my daughter swimming.
- a search for "squirrel" including meekcats
- a search for "cat" including some dogs
- a search for "ghost" including a slightly blurred picture of my wife
- a search for "man" showing some women and "woman" showing some men