 Image copyright Twitter Image caption Mr Alcine tweeted Google about the fact its app had misclassified his photo 
 
 Google says it is "appalled" that its new Photos app mistakenly labelled a black couple as being "gorillas". The photo service, launched in May, automatically tags uploaded pictures using its own artificial intelligence software. Jacky Alcine, a Web developer who is black, took to Twitter to say Google's Photo app, released in May, labeled a picture of him and a friend as "gorillas.' "My friend's not a gorilla," Alcine tweeted. pic.twitter.com/SMkMCsNVX4 
 
 Shortly after, Alciné was contacted by Yonatan Zunger, the chief architect of social at Google. Image copyright Twitter Image caption Mr Alcine said the error had affected several photos in his collection 
 
 He added it was "also working on longer-term fixes around both linguistics - words to be careful about in photos of people - and image recognition itself - eg better recognition of dark-skinned faces". After Google learned of the incident with Alcine's photo, the company apologized immediately tried to fix it. “We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened,” a Google spokeswoman told the BBC on Wednesday. “We are taking immediate action to prevent this type of result from appearing. There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labelling, and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future.” 
 
 Google is not the only platform trying to work out bugs in its automatic image labelling. The algorithm tagged a photo of a black man as an ape, and concentration camp photos got tags like "jungle gym" and "sport."
– The automated photo-tagging on the Google Photos app introduced in May isn't perfect, Google admits. Sometimes it gives a photo a wrong or irrelevant tag—and, on at least one occasion, an extremely offensive one. The company had some groveling to do after the app labeled a photo of two black people as "gorillas," the Guardian reports. The man in the photo, software developer Jacky Alcine, complained to Google, where exec Yonatan Zunger told him the mistake was "100% not OK" and "high on my list of bugs you 'never' want to see happen," the BBC reports. He thanked him for helping Google fix the problem. "We're appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened," a Google spokeswoman tells the BBC. "We are taking immediate action to prevent this type of result from appearing. There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labeling, and we're looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future." Algorithms caused similar problems at Flickr a few months ago, where some pictures of people, both black and white, were labeled "apes" or "animals," and a picture of the Dachau concentration camp was labeled "jungle gym," CNET notes. (Apple Watch gets confused by tattoos.)