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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."
Considering the equivalent intelligence of a computer, mis-identifying a gorilla and a black person based on facial features alone isn't half bad... It's exactly something you'd expect from a low intelligence entity with little experience and limited comprehension of the ramifications of the identification. Similar to a toddler, don't be surprised when computers start thinking all fat people are going to have a baby just because they have been told that there is a baby inside a big belly.
It's pattern recognition. The computers are seeing a pattern, but it's incomplete and thus wrong. It's not like the computer was programmed to be offensive...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
It was frequently used as a term of offense during the slave trade...
While Gorilla has been used as offensive term for blacks, you shouldn't make up facts. Just stick to the truth - it's bad enough as it is.
Gorillas weren't even known in the Western world until 1847. There's only a 14-year overlap with American Slavery (trans-atlantic slave trade having been abolished almost a half century before the discovery), and it's not like the American South was tapped into the latest ecology news out of Africa.