Yahoo: The image recognition software built into Google Photos is impressive. Show it a photo of the Eiffel Tower, and it will know that picture was taken in Paris. Snap an image of a dog or a tree, and it will automatically put them in a group with all your other pictures of dogs or trees.
But the software is far from foolproof. And when it fails, it does so in a spectacular way — as when it recently processed a photo of two black friends and labeled them “Gorillas.”
Jacky Alcine, a 21-year old programmer who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., was checking out his Google Photos account last night when he saw that the service had automatically generated a folder titled “Gorillas.” It contained nothing but pictures of him and a friend that he had taken in 2013.
When alerted to the error, Google provided a solution to the problem within hours and issued an immediate mea culpa.
