As technology continues to evolve, there will always be growing pains. A good example of this is Google’s new image-recognition program. When the app was first released, Google creators warned that it probably wouldn’t get everything right. Yahoo brought this news to us in their article, “Google’s new app blunders by calling black people ‘gorillas’.”
A mortifying example of that played out recently. A smartphone screen shot posted on Twitter by a New York man showed the recently released Google Photos app had sorted a picture of two black people into a category labeled as “gorillas.” A sad and ill-timed reminder that even the most intelligent machines still have lot to learn about human sensitivity.
Google has apologized and promised immediate action in preventing a repeat event. “There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labeling,” Google spokesperson Katie Watson conceded.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
