Google making changes after Gemini AI portrayed people of color inaccurately
Google said Thursday that it would temporarily limit the ability to create images of people with its artificial-intelligence tool Gemini after it produced illustrations with historical inaccuracies.
Google said Thursday that it would temporarily limit the ability to create images of people with its artificial-intelligence tool Gemini after it produced illustrations with historical inaccuracies.
The pause was announced in a post on X after the company acknowledged the issues in a statement the day before, writing: “We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately. Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here.”
Google announced its “next-generation” AI model, Gemini 1.5, last week, touting it as its most capable yet. Google is one of many tech companies that are feverishly competing to develop the best generative AI systems that can create text, images and video from simple prompts.
After its launch, Gemini drew the attention of some pundits and technologists, including many on the right who have been critical of efforts to make AI more inclusive, with some leveling accusations that Google’s AI was a prime example of “woke AI.”
The most widely noticed inaccuracies involved inserting people of color into places where they wouldn’t historically appear. For example, The Verge reported that asking Gemini to create an illustration of a 1943 German soldier resulted in AI-generated drawings of nonwhite people in Nazi uniforms. Gemini also created images of some nonwhite Founding Fathers and U.S. senators from the 1800s, when in reality they were all white men.
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