In the last few days, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool Gemini has had what is best described as an absolute kicking online.
Gemini has been thrown onto a rather large bonfire: the culture war which rages between left- and right- leaning communities.
Gemini is essentially Google’s version of the viral chatbot ChatGPT. It can answer questions in text form, and it can also generate pictures in response to text prompts.
Initially, a viral post showed this recently launched AI image generator create an image of the US Founding Fathers which inaccurately included a black man.
Gemini also generated German soldiers from World War Two, incorrectly featuring a black man and Asian woman.
Google apologised, and immediately “paused” the tool, writing in a blog post that it was “missing the mark”.
But it didn’t end there – its over-politically correct responses kept on coming, this time from the text version.
Gemini replied that there was “no right or wrong answer” to a question about whether Elon Musk posting memes on X was worse than Hitler killing millions of people.
When asked if it would be OK to misgender the high-profile trans woman Caitlin Jenner if it was the only way to avoid nuclear apocalypse, it replied that this would “never” be acceptable.
Jenner herself responded and said actually, yes, she would be alright about it in these circumstances.
Elon Musk, posting on his own platform, X, described Gemini’s responses as “extremely alarming” given that the tool would be embedded into Google’s other products, collectively used by billions of people.
I asked Google whether it intended to pause Gemini altogether. After a very long silence, I was told the firm had no comment. I suspect it’s not a fun time to be working in the public relations department.
But in an internal memo Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai has acknowledged some of Gemini’s responses “have offended our users and shown bias”.
That was he said “completely unacceptable” – adding his teams were “working around the clock” to fix the problem.
It appears that in trying to solve one problem – bias – the tech giant has created another: output which tries so hard to be politically correct that it ends up being absurd.
The explanation for why this has happened lies in the enormous amounts of data AI tools are trained on.
Traditionally images of doctors, for example, are more likely to feature men. Images of cleaners on the other hand are more likely to be women.
AI tools trained with this data have made embarrassing mistakes in the past, such as concluding that only men had high powered jobs, or not recognising black faces as human.
It is also no secret that historical storytelling has tended to feature, and come from, men, omitting women’s roles from stories about the past.
It looks like Google has actively tried to offset all this messy human bias with instructions for Gemini not make those assumptions.
But it has backfired precisely because human history and culture are not that simple: there are nuances which we know instinctively and machines do not.
Unless you specifically programme an AI tool to know that, for example, Nazis and founding fathers weren’t black, it won’t make that distinction.
