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Beryllium Sphere (r) [soylentnews.org] writes:

Google Photo tries to categorize your pictures automatically.

Until very recently, it had a failure mode in which its classification for some pictures of humans was "Gorillas".

Google reacted very quickly when they got a complaint from a black woman who had been misclassified.

Speculating, it's possible that their software is heavy on statistical matching and it really hard to debug, which is why they wound up simply deleting "Gorilla" from the list of possible categories.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/06/30/google_s_image_recognition_software_returns_some_surprisingly_racist_results.html [slate.com]

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