Seth Fiegerman says, “Flickr has accidentally created an insensitive monster.

The popular photo-sharing website, which is owned by Yahoo, rolled out a suite of new options earlier this month, including an automatic tagging feature using the company’s “image recognition technology.”

The goal: to make it easier for people to organize and search for photos.

The outcome: plenty of outrage.

At first, Flickr users noticed unwanted — but mostly harmless — tags like “outdoor,” “people” and “monochrome” added to their photos. Then some noticed more offensive and clearly mistaken tags: Close-up images of peoples’ faces had the tag “ape.”“.

Flickr’s monstrous tagging algorithm labels people as ‘apes’

Mashable
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