A ban on religious words such as “God”, “church”, “Christian” and “Jesus” at Kmart photo printing kiosks has been blamed on a software error.

Shoppers Anthony and Marelynda Dorsett spotted the issue when they tried to add captions to their photographs on a Kodak self-service print machine at Kmart on Tuesday, The Daily Telegraph reported.

The newspaper’s ensuing investigation revealed that the words “Jesus”, “Allah”, “Christian”, “bible”, “God”, “Jewish” and “church” were marked as “profanity” and censored by the system at a number of Kmart stores across Sydney.

“Profanity has been detected in text and was substituted with *****,” the message on the machine read.

Kmart said the ban was unintentional. 

“This is a system error and it will be updated overnight,” said a Kmart spokeswoman.

“It in no way reflects our views as a business. At Kmart, we support diversity and inclusiveness irrespective of race, religion, age, gender, ethnicity, ability, appearance or attitude, and we want our teams and stores to reflect the communities in which we operate.”

Kodak sales and marketing manager Gavin Wulfsohn said the religious word ban was a “complete error”. He said the newly installed “profanity detecting software” came pre-loaded with a list of offensive words, but the issue extends beyond religious terms, with the word “Canadian” also being banned.