Associated Incidents
Story highlights Google Photos tagged an African-American man's pictures of him and a friend as "Gorillas"
He highlighted the problem on Twitter, drawing the attention of a Google engineer
(CNN) When Jacky Alcine looked at his Google Photos app recently, he was appalled by what he saw. The facial recognition software had tagged pictures of him and a friend, both of them African-Americans, with the word "Gorillas."
Alcine, a computer programmer in New York, called out Google about the blunder that had served up the offensive racial slur on the photos he'd uploaded.
"What kind of sample image data you collected that would result in this?" he asked in a series of angry tweets Sunday evening.
And it's only photos I have with her it's doing this with (results truncated b/c personal): pic.twitter.com/h7MTXd3wgo — diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015
His outraged comments quickly picked up traction and the attention of a senior engineer at Google, who identified himself as Yonatan Zunger on Twitter. His account was linked to a Google+ blog of a senior engineer of the same name.
The chief architect of the Internet giant's Google+ platform, promptly jumped into the fray, expressing horror at the bug and promising to get it fixed as quickly as possible.
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