'Machine Learning Is Hard': Google Photos Has Egregious Facial Recognition Error

In May, Google unfurled its new Photos app as the crowning achievement of machine learning capabilities — a service that stores and catalogues your images with computing smarts that can pick out buildings, landscapes, animals, even abstract events like birthdays, on its own.

As users get their hands on the app, though, it’s evident Photos is far from perfect. Two days ago, Jacky Alciné, an African-American programmer based in New York, flagged a flagrant error on Photos: It had tagged him and his friend as “gorillas.”

Google Photos, y’all fucked up. My friend’s not a gorilla. pic.twitter.com/SMkMCsNVX4

— diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015

To Google’s credit, its human ambassadors responded swiftly. Yonatan Zunger, an engineer and “chief architect” of Google+, the social service from which Photos was stripped, replied to Alciné on Twitter within roughly 90 minutes, noting that he had alerted the Photos team.

@jackyalcine Holy fuck. G+ CA here. No, this is not how you determine someone’s target market. This is 100% Not OK.

— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 29, 2015

Zunger checked in with Twitter missives the following day; Alciné thanked him, and noted that the erroneous label was removed.

Google has advanced more on artificial intelligence than others, infusing the advanced tech into speech and photo recognition as well as natural language processing. (Its trippy neural network construction has yet to be baked into consumer products.) The company is frank that its machine learning abilities still have a way to go. In his exchange on Twitter, Zunger noted how the company was still working on “long-term fixes” for linguistics and image recognition for “dark-skinned faces.”

Google put out this conciliatory statement: “We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened. We are taking immediate action to prevent this type of result from appearing. There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labeling, and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future.”

Zunger, for his part, put it more bluntly.

@wiselar @louisgray @jackyalcine I wish it were. Until recently, it was confusing white faces with dogs and seals. Machine learning is hard.

— Yonatan Zunger (@yonatanzunger) June 30, 2015

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Contributions are a key part of the future of Vox

Readers rely on Vox for clear, nuanced coverage that not only illuminates the issues, but poses solutions, too. And we rely on help from our readers: Advertising and grants cover the majority of our costs, but we count on contributions to help us close the gaps in our budget. In fact, we’re looking to reach 95,000 individual contributions before the end of the year. Will you make the next contribution right now? Our average gift is just $20 — and it goes a long way in helping us keep our work free. Vox is here to help everyone understand what’s shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. Join that mission by making a contribution today.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via