Eight years back, in 2015, tech giant Google launched its independent Photos application, capable of categorizing and tagging individuals, locations, and items depicted in a picture.
A couple of weeks later, Jacky Alciné, a software engineer of African descent, tweeted addressing the company and highlighting that the picture identification software employed by the tech giant in it's Photos application consistently misidentified pictures of himself as well as his companion as "gorillas."
The New York based engineer, expressed his concerns on Twitter, questioning the testing pictures used by the company that led to these terrible outcome.
Google expressed their deep shock for the error, offering an apology to Alciné. They also assured that they would work to fix the issue.
One of Google's representative revealed that the term "gorilla" won't be used to classify pictures. Additionally, he mentioned that the company will be focusing on permanent solution of the issue. The company initially encountered this unfortunate mistake 8 years back when they introduced the Google Photos app, admitting that their sampling content lacked sufficient representation of colored individuals. Surprisingly, even after these years and significant advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, The New York Times reported that the tech giant has yet to rectify the issue being highlighted.
Instead of taking the chance of another damaging misclassification, the company has decided to disable its picture identification system from spotting gorillas and others from the same species, thereby limiting the functionality of the service.
To investigate further, the news agency examined a number of sample contents containing humans, animals, and items within the recognizing application . The system succeeded in pointing out images of asked queries for different animals. However, when queries were set for gorillas, system failed to point out any relevant picture. The study revealed that Apple Photos faced the issue as well when attempting to identify content of the same animal. Apple Photos has likewise disabled the feature to visually search for primates due to concerns of errors.
The report revealed the challenging obstacles tech firms encounter when improving image analysis technology and the biasness present in AI, particularly in the identification of people with dark tone.
Apple refused to give any response on the study , while a Google representative stated that their photo app refrained from marking anything as gorilla.
Read next: Adobe plans to incorporate artificial intelligence into Photoshop
A couple of weeks later, Jacky Alciné, a software engineer of African descent, tweeted addressing the company and highlighting that the picture identification software employed by the tech giant in it's Photos application consistently misidentified pictures of himself as well as his companion as "gorillas."
The New York based engineer, expressed his concerns on Twitter, questioning the testing pictures used by the company that led to these terrible outcome.
Google expressed their deep shock for the error, offering an apology to Alciné. They also assured that they would work to fix the issue.
One of Google's representative revealed that the term "gorilla" won't be used to classify pictures. Additionally, he mentioned that the company will be focusing on permanent solution of the issue. The company initially encountered this unfortunate mistake 8 years back when they introduced the Google Photos app, admitting that their sampling content lacked sufficient representation of colored individuals. Surprisingly, even after these years and significant advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, The New York Times reported that the tech giant has yet to rectify the issue being highlighted.
Instead of taking the chance of another damaging misclassification, the company has decided to disable its picture identification system from spotting gorillas and others from the same species, thereby limiting the functionality of the service.
To investigate further, the news agency examined a number of sample contents containing humans, animals, and items within the recognizing application . The system succeeded in pointing out images of asked queries for different animals. However, when queries were set for gorillas, system failed to point out any relevant picture. The study revealed that Apple Photos faced the issue as well when attempting to identify content of the same animal. Apple Photos has likewise disabled the feature to visually search for primates due to concerns of errors.
The report revealed the challenging obstacles tech firms encounter when improving image analysis technology and the biasness present in AI, particularly in the identification of people with dark tone.
Apple refused to give any response on the study , while a Google representative stated that their photo app refrained from marking anything as gorilla.
Read next: Adobe plans to incorporate artificial intelligence into Photoshop
