> Ultimately, Google applied a secondary solution, reworking the system so that it wouldn’t tie photos to the “Gorilla” tag at all. Zunger writes that it is also working to develop a number of “longer-term fixes,” including identifying “words to be careful about in photos of people” and “better recognition of dark skinned faces.”<p>I hope photos of gorillas are not now marked as "black people" - since they've blocked the gorilla tag being used.
This is the problem with automatic image processing and categorization. It's good, but mistakes like this can happen and embarrass an entire company.
So assuming this was a mistaken classification that happened naturally and not the result of someone purposefully training the system to do this... does this mean we need to teach these systems to be politically correct? Confusing a dog and a goat doesn't carry the same potential to cause extreme negative publicity that an error like this does, especially when the system works well enough that most other classification attempts are correct.
Great algorithm accuracy: 98,25% of DNA shared between gorillas and humans. I could forgiven the error easily is someone tagged me as gorilla.<p>Modify tags with positive adjectives that work both ways like "Strong as a gorilla" or "Happy as a chimp" and the 90% of the current problems will dissapear.
If I called somebody a gorilla out of anger, I might end up apologizing to the gorilla.<p>Gorillas are much better behaved than primates in general so I wouldn't be insulted if somebody called me a gorilla.