The companies behind artificial intelligences know that sometimes their creations can generate quite biased and stereotyped results. That is why companies like OpenAI have been perfecting their models over time, especially in order to avoid user criticism. But what happens when you go too far and cause your AI to present results that are too “well-behaved”?
That’s exactly what happened to Google, which has admitted this week that it messed up after being accused of its generative AI image generator Gemini going too far in its attempt to promote diversity, by systematically turning white historical figures into non-white ones.
Gemini’s efforts to diversify its results sparked outrage among many users, who deemed Gemini’s images historically inaccurate. The AI made many mistakes with the founding fathers of the US, making some of them black (they were all very white), and also changing the skin tone of the Popes throughout history (all whiter than a scared vampire). Other blunders of the AI included changing the race or gender of Vikings, Nazis, and even famous Canadian hockey players.
Things got worse when some users said they asked Gemini to create a white person in the story, and the AI was unable to do so, but it was able to produce an image of a black person seemingly without any issues. The controversy escalated even further when a former Google employee claimed on Twitter that it is “shamefully difficult to get Google Gemini to recognize that white people exist”.
“We are working to improve this type of representation immediately,” said Jack Krawczyk, Senior Director of Product Management at Google for Gemini Experiences, in a statement. “Gemini’s AI-generated images generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally good because it’s used by people from all over the world. But it’s failing here.”
And it’s not the first time that Gemini (formerly Bard) goes crazy. In the early weeks of Bard’s life, the AI made many mistakes when asked about scientific data, and the situation reached the point where it caused the value of Alphabet’s shares to collapse, Google’s parent company, causing the company to lose billions.
