Reminds me of how Google Photos couldn't differentiate between a black person & a monkey, so they've excluded that term from search altogether.
While the endeavour itself is good, fixes are sometimes hilariously bad or biased (untrue)
Technically that is what happened, but it paints an incorrect picture in people's minds. Out of the billions of images that Google Photos had auto-tagged, it tagged one picture of two black people as "gorillas".[1] This was probably the first time this had ever happened. (If it had happened before, it surely would have been spread far and wide by social media & the press.)
So Google's classifier was inaccurate 0.0000001% of the time, but the PR was so bad that Google "fixed" the issue by blacklisting certain tags (monkey, gorilla, etc). If you take photos of monkeys, you'll have to tag them yourself.
I'm sure Google could do better, but the standard required to avoid a PR disaster is impossible to meet. If the classifier isn't perfect forever, they're guaranteed to draw outrage.
1. https://twitter.com/jackyalcine/status/615329515909156865
That is a very big leap. Social media might be widespread, but almost everything in the world goes unremarked upon. Think of all the news stories that turn up an old tweet or Facebook post that, if anyone had paid attention at the time, would have stopped events from progressing.
I remember a while back Google got flack because the image search for "scientist" was almost entirely famous African American scientists. That's now changed and shows stock images of (mostly white) people in lab coats.
"Three black teenagers" shows mostly groups of mugshots.
The word "Brazilian" shows hot, almost nude women. "German" shows the flag. "Portuguese" shows maps, flags, and a lot of normal looking people. "Hispanic" all pictures are normal looking people.
For instance search for 'green circle' - okay you get mostly green circles. Now search for 'green circle with red line' and the results are completely nonsensical. The huge leap forward in search engines was being able to avoid returning hardcore porn when searching for Abraham Lincoln. But in spite of tens of thousands of engineers, hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, and all sorts of fancy declarations of ultra sophisticated AI solving every problem under the sun, we really haven't moved that far beyond that early milestone.