The Gemini artificial intelligence program will not be allowed to generate images of people pending a patch, Google announced on Thursday, after critics panned it as “absurdly woke” and “blatantly racist.”
Formerly known as Bard, Gemini was launched earlier this month and advertised as Google’s “most capable family of models,” able to generate “captivating images.” When asked for images of US founding fathers, Russian emperors, French kings, popes and even 1930s Nazi German soldiers, the AI returned results celebrating the modern US concept of “diversity” instead.
“White people appeared to be the only racial category that Gemini refused to show,” according to a Fox Business summary of their experiment with the AI.
On Wednesday, Google said it was “aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions.” By Thursday, the company announced it was “already working to address recent issues” with the image generation feature, adding that requests to generate images of people will be paused until the release of an improved version.
Gemini users have posted numerous examples of “inaccuracies” on X (formerly Twitter), including a black man and a South Asian-looking woman dressed up as the head of the Roman Catholic Church, black and Asian vikings, and American “founders” that were nothing of the sort.
Another user posted a thread in which Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers were both racially diverse and female – just like the two “greatest tsars of Russia.”
Another widely circulating example showed Gemini insisting on diversity among the Nazis as well.
