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When It Comes to Gorillas, Google Photos Remains Blind (wired.com)
Tom Simonite, writing for Wired: In 2015, a black software developer embarrassed Google by tweeting that the company's Photos service had labeled photos of him with a black friend as "gorillas." Google declared itself "appalled and genuinely sorry." An engineer who became the public face of the clean-up operation said the label gorilla would no longer be applied to groups of images, and that Google was "working on longer-term fixes." More than two years later, one of those fixes is erasing gorillas, and some other primates, from the service's lexicon. The awkward workaround illustrates the difficulties Google and other tech companies face in advancing image-recognition technology, which the companies hope to use in self-driving cars, personal assistants, and other products. WIRED tested Google Photos using a collection of 40,000 images well-stocked with animals. It performed impressively at finding many creatures, including pandas and poodles. But the service reported "no results" for the search terms "gorilla," "chimp," "chimpanzee," and "monkey."
It's like that recent H&M ad scandal with the little kid wearing a "Coolest monkey in the jungle" shirt. Kids get called monkeys all the time... when they're playing (especially climbing trees!) there's not a hell of a lot of difference between them and other young primates playing.
Because of (primarily) American racism issues, everyone assumes if you're calling a dark-skinned kid a 'monkey' you're trying to chain him and put him to work picking cotton. Same thing here - it's an understandable situation that gets people all bent out of shape because of shit that SHOULD be nothing but embarrassing history that died with our grandparents' generation.
I'm as white as they come and Google Photos has tagged several monkeys in my pictures as me. Nobody is writing news stories about that (as well they shouldn't!), but because this guy is black the world ended ?
You do not have the right not to be offended. Generally I shouldn't go out of my way to do something just to offend you but that's not even close to the case here. I seriously doubt many people were offended. I do however think a certain group of people used this as an opportunity to criticize google. This group of people care less about difficulties black people face than they do care about being seen about caring about black issues. There is a reason SJW is a derogatory term.
There are so many actual issues that black or native North Americans face where the solutions are actually hindered by SJWs. It is quite frustrating.
1) IQ tests are extremely culturally biased. There may be average intelligence differences you could correlate with skin colour, but none we can currently measure, and certainly none significant enough to use to prejudge individual ability.
2) Koko is a fraud that has been debunked several times. Koko is amazing, but nowhere near the level of amazing that the involved researchers proclaim.
3) Reality isn't nice, but you're racist.