Google Photos mislabels black Americans as 'gorillas'

Google Photos has been discovered to be automatically labelling black people as 'gorillas', prompting disgust amongst internet users and accusations of racial and ethnic stereotyping by civil rights advocates.

The discovery was made by programmer Jacky Alcine, who discovered that a folder named 'Gorillas' had been automatically generated in his Google Photos account. The folder contained photographs of Alcine and a Black friend. 

Alcine alerted Google to the problem, which quickly apologised and promised 'immediate action' to resolve the issue, which was thought likely to have involved the poor classification of image training data.

In 2018, WIRED discovered that Google had prevented Google Photos from labelling images as a gorilla, chimpanzee, or monkey, including pictures of the primates themselves.

Despite major advances in image recognition, Google Photos - and Apple Photos - failed to find any images with the images, according to a 2023 New York Times report.