Will Al Sharpton protest Google?

[Ed Pawlowski]

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.

[Gordon Shumway]

Why is the "Photos" team working on a fix? They got it right. Unfortunately PETA is going to get pissed off for the gorilla getting a bad rap.

[J Burns]

I pulled up some gorilla pics to refresh my memory. I don't see any points of similarity.

Is it coincidence that the person who tweeted the photo of herself is a programmer? Has she been monkeying with the software?

[Ed Pawlowski]

If you look at some of the baby gorillas they do have a more human looking facial features

[Upstart]

One side-benefit of threads like this is that they make it possible to identify the ass-holes like you.

[Senator Pocketstuffer]

Seems like an honest mistake. Even Dubya resembles our ancestors.

[J Burns]

I pulled up baby gorilla pics and didn't see any points if similarity.

I was mistaken. Alciné is the guy in the background. His Google+ page is public. He uses a comical, maybe photoshopped, pic of his face for his avatar (if that's what it's called). He's witty and likes to poke fun at systems, such as iOS.

Google's solution was to remove GORILLA from its tags. I think he fooled the artificial intelligence by uploading other pics of the girl and choosing the gorilla tag. Maybe he even told the app this pic should be tagged as as a gorilla. Then he tweeted, "Google Photos, y?all f**ked up. My friend?s not a gorilla."

I'll bet he did not foresee that the media would turn it into a story of pervasive racism at Google.

[rbowman]

Google was having problems with dogs, seals, and horses too so I don't think so. (I'll ignore the pun) You have to remember it's a computer algorithm. Pick up some biometrics and start looking for a best match.