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."

Comments

Black Panthers was perfectly acceptable

[mi]

That gorillas and black software developers are not in the same category?

Of course, they are in a multitude of the same categories together:

• mammals
• hominids
• omnivorous.

The above applies to all races, but the skin color adds one more common category for Blacks. Big deal.

Somehow being called a "gorilla" is deemed offensive, which is patently ridiculous. Black panthers was fine, but gorilla is bad? Seriously? And because it is considered bad — irrationally — by someone, we can't have Google's image-recognition to work — they without special-casing? And they must continue to apologize for something?