Google Photos automatically labelled Black people as 'gorillas', prompting disgust and accusations of racial and ethnic stereotyping.

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.