Google Apologises After Tagging African Americans as Gorillas

Alcine's post quickly received the attention of Yonatan Zunger, the chief architect of Social at Google. He touched base with Alcine via Twitter and promised to deliver a solution to the problem. You can read their exchange on Twitter here.

Earlier this year, Google rolled out an updated Photo spun off from its social network Google+. The version featured an image recognition technology that neatly identifies objects in the photo and organized photos under labels.

Google said the mistake shows there is still room for improvement in their technology.

"We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened. We are taking immediate action to prevent this type of result from appearing," a spokesperson for Google told news site Ars Technica.

"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."

The search giant continues to be at the fore of image recognition launching apps the leverage the feature, such as Google Goggles and the stand alone app Photos. Last year, Google also began collaborating with Stanford University to develop a software that not only identifies individual objects on the image but also describes the scenery.