Google Photos app was launched at the I/O 2015 conference

Jul 7, 2015 12:20 GMT  ·  By

Last week, we reported an awkward incident that had Google sitting at its center. The search giant’s new Photos App made a racist slip by tagging an Afro-American individual as “gorilla.”

Well, today we bring you news of a similar slip, although maybe not as racially offensive. Rocket News reports that a Japanese user took to Twitter to recount a similar story. Apparently, his father had been mistakenly (obviously) tagged as a horse. Still, he doesn’t seem to be all that appalled by the incident.

He posted some evidence on the social media website, and you can see for yourself that the picture of an elderly man sitting behind a fence is clearly tagged “uma” or “horse” in Japanese. Well, we sort of understand Google Photos’ confusion, what was he doing behind the fence on a grassy field anyway?

Going back to being serious, it’s more than evident that Google’s Photos app facial-recognition technology needs a lot of fine-tuning.

The Photos app goes wild once again

After the “gorilla” incident, Chief Social Architect Yonathan Zunger apologized to the offended party saying that he notified the Google Photos team of the unfortunate event. Zunger also swore that the Google Photos team would be on the lookout for other potentially offensive tags in the future. But here’s proof that another bug slipped in without anyone at Google noticing.

Google removed the “gorilla” tag from the app’s database, because assembly people don’t take too many pictures of monkeys, so not many users will be affected by the decision. But what if the “horse” tag gets removed too? We hope you don’t live at a farm or something along these lines.

Anyway, the removal of the tag is obviously a temporary solution until Google’s software is better initiated in the art of properly recognizing the human face.

While Google proved to be quick to handle the first mishap, we hope that a second one will hurry things along the right path. We certainly don’t want to hear of people being labeled as chickens, hamsters or other members of the animal kingdom.