Google on Thursday accused its Gemini chatbot’s image generation tool of creating “diverse” images that are not historically or factually accurate, including images of black Vikings, Native American popes, and female NHL players. The company announced it would be “temporarily suspended” after receiving widespread criticism in the media.
Users called Gemini “ridiculously woke” and “unusable” after a request to generate representative images of subjects such as America’s Founding Fathers resulted in bizarre revisionist photos. ” he criticized.
“We are already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation capabilities,” Google said in a statement published on X. “While we do this, we will pause human image generation and re-release an improved version.” We will update it soon. ”
Examples include an AI image of a black man that appears to represent George Washington in a white powdered wig and Continental Army uniform, and even though all 266 popes in history have been white men. , which included an AI image of a Southeast Asian woman dressed as a pope.
A shocking example is discovered by the vergeGemini also produced “diverse” representations of Nazi-era German soldiers, including an Asian woman and a black man in 1943 uniforms.
Google previously acknowledged that it needed to fix the chatbot’s erratic behavior.
“We’re working to immediately improve this type of depiction,” Jack Kraczyk, Google’s senior director of product management for Gemini Experiences, told the Post.
“Gemini’s AI image generation generates a wide variety of people. This is generally a good thing since people all over the world are using it. But here it misses the point.”
The Post has reached out to Google for further comment.
This was a significant misstep for Google, which just earlier this month rebranded its flagship AI chatbot product as Gemini and introduced much-touted new features including image generation.
The blunder also comes days after OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT, introduced a new AI tool called Sora that creates videos based on users’ text prompts.
Google doesn’t publish the parameters that control the Gemini chatbot’s behavior, so it’s hard to get a clear explanation for why it fabricated so many different versions of historical figures and events.
When asked by the Post to provide reliability and safety guidelines, Gemini acknowledged that they are not public “due to technical complexity and intellectual property considerations.”
The chatbot also acknowledged that it was aware of “criticisms that Gemini prioritized forced diversity in image generation, which may have led to historically inaccurate depictions.”
“The algorithms behind the image generation model are complex and are still being developed,” Gemini said. “They may have a hard time understanding the nuances of historical context and cultural expressions, which can lead to inaccurate output.”
