Mislabeling Incident: Google Photos Identifies Black Individuals as 'Gorillas'

In a recent AI incident, Google Photos, a popular photo management service, mistakenly labeled some black individuals as gorillas. This unfortunate oversight highlights the need for responsible AI governance and trustworthy AI models. The mislabeled images were part of a collection that was uploaded to the platform and prompted an immediate outcry on social media.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.475, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 3.5 — similarity 0.467, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.2 — similarity 0.460, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/16

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.