The Google Photos app makes a colossal and racist mistake
Since its launch, the Google Photos service has attracted the attention of specialized media and users in equal parts. And it seems to have provided the definitive solution to the problem of smartphones andphotographs at present: a cloud with unlimited space and at no cost Of course, taking into account some limits that, for the moment, do not imply any visual difference between compressed photos and those that are not so as not to overcome these barriers.All this accompanied by some very interesting functions such as the automatic creation of animations or collages, or the intelligent organization of photos. But it is precisely in this last feature where the service has screwed up in the worst possible way
And, until now, almost everything was praise for the service, until a user complained on the social network Twitter for a major mistake: has tagged a photo featuring two black people (the user himself and his girlfriend) in category Gorillas, inside animals A blisswhich can have many racist connotations and which has raised a few blisters both on social networks and within Google
After the young man's complaint on Twitter, directly mentioning Googleto ask for explanations in this regard, one of the engineers responsible for the service did not take long to answer apologizing and accepting the error, trying not to enter into discussions about the how or why of the matter.
According to Google, they regret this event and are already working on improving the tagging system of Google Photos To date, the service analyzes the images uploaded to this cloud to find out what appears in the photos. A fairly successful function to date, capable of detecting skyscrapers, lakes, differentiating between animals, identifying photos of food, photos of landscapes, and a very long etcetera . It is true that it still has failures how to sometimes confuse dogs with horses, or not correctly identify some elements that seem clear, surprising in other photos due to their percentage of success.But I had never confused people with apes And even less when the issue of race and skin color is involved.
Apparently the service still needs some improvements, so Google has removed the tag Gorillas to prevent this problem from happening again. In addition, they claim to be improving their algorithm so that parsing and tagging is more accurate However its system is smart, and learns by analyzing new photos, so it will get better over time as more users use it.
These are the usual problems of leaving a machine in charge, without the reasoning capacity of a person. At the moment it seems that the problem has become an ugly anecdote, taking remedial measures immediately and trying to relax the tone regarding the problem of racism.Of course it is not the first problem of this type that happens. Other programs and recognition software have suffered similar issues by failing to correctly recognize the skin tone of users , or by misidentifying the light and illumination of a photograph.
