Google Photo App Labels Black Couple 'Gorillas'

Google (Xetra: A0B7FY - news) has said it is "genuinely sorry" after its image recognition software labelled photographs of a black couple as "gorillas".

The Google Photos application, launched in May, uses an automatic tagging tool to help organise uploaded images and make searching easier.

But the artificial intelligence software mistakenly described African-American computer programmer Jacky Alcine and his friend.

On Monday, Mr Alcine, of Brooklyn, New York, spotted the egregious blunder.

In a series of tweets to Google, he said: "Google Photos, y'all f***** up. My friend's not a gorilla."

He added: "The only thing under this tag is my friend and I being tagged as a gorilla."

Mr Alcine also remarked: "What kind of sample image data you collected that would result in this son?"

He received a response from Google's chief social architect Yonatan Zunger later that day.

"This is 100 percent not okay," said Mr Zunger, promising a fix later that evening.

Google said in a 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."

One person on Twitter (Xetra: A1W6XZ - news) dubbed it "the first instance of A.I. racism".