Google Apologizes for Racist Photo-Tagging Results

Not okay, Google.

The Web giant's new Photos app, which can automatically tag photos and generate albums, has been called creepy, but racist, too? As was first reported by Ars Technica, the search giant was forced to apologize this week after the service automatically tagged two black people as gorillas.

Computer programmer Jacky Alciné reported the issue on Twitter after discovering that Google Photos had created an album labeled "Gorillas" featuring no actual photos of gorillas but images of him and another black friend.

"What kind of sample image data you collected that would result in this son?" Alciné questioned.

Less than two hours later, Google's Chief Social Architect Yonatan Zunger addressed the issue and was ready to do damage control.

@jackyalcine Holy fuck. G+ CA here. No, this is not how you determine someone's target market. This is 100% Not OK.

— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015

"Sheesh," Zunger tweeted. "High on my list of bugs you *never* want to see happen."

He later said that the "gorilla" label has been removed from the app, and Google is working on longer-term fixes to better recognize dark-skinned faces.

"Lots of work being done, and lots still to be done. But we're very much on it," Zunger said.

"We're appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened," Google told PCMag. "We are taking immediate action to prevent this type of result from appearing. There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labeling, and we're looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future."

Meanwhile, this isn't the only racially insensitive incident involving Google. The search giant also apologized earlier this year after it was discovered that searching for the n-word on Google Maps directed you to the White House. Jen Fitzpatrick, vice president of Engineering and Product Management at Google, said the gaffe was a "mess up" and that Google was "deeply upset by this issue."

"Certain offensive search terms were triggering unexpected maps results, typically because people had used the offensive term in online discussions of the place," Fitzpatrick wrote. "This surfaced inappropriate results that users likely weren't looking for."