Google is pausing its new Gemini AI tool after users blasted the image generator for being “too woke” by replacing white historical figures with people of other racial groups. The Mail has more.
The AI tool churned out racially diverse Vikings, knights, founding fathers and even Nazi soldiers.
Artificial intelligence programmes learn from the information available to them, and researchers have warned that AI is prone to recreate the racism, sexism and other biases of its creators and of society at large.
In this case, Google may have overcorrected in its efforts to address discrimination, as some users fed it prompt after prompt in failed attempts to get the AI to make a picture of a white person.
“We’re aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions,” the company’s communications team wrote in a post to X on Wednesday.
The historically inaccurate images led some users to accuse the AI of being racist against white people or too woke.
In its initial statement, Google admitted to “missing the mark”, while maintaining that Gemini’s racially diverse images are “generally a good thing because people around the world use it”.
On Thursday, the company’s Communications team wrote: “We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature. While we do this, we’re going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon.”
But even the pause announcement failed to appease critics, who responded with ‘go woke, go broke’ and other fed-up retorts.
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