SAN FRANCISCO ? Google has apologized after its new Photos application identified black people as "gorillas."
On Sunday Brooklyn programmer Jacky Alciné tweeted a screenshot of photos he had uploaded in which the app had labeled Alcine and a friend, both African American, "gorillas."
Image recognition software is still a nascent technology but its use is spreading quickly. Google launched its Photos app at Google I/O in May, touting its machine-learning smarts to recognize people, places and events on its own.
Yontan Zunger, an engineer and the company's chief architect of Google+, responded swiftly to Alciné on Twitter: "This is 100% Not OK." And he promised that Google's Photos team was working on a fix.