(LifeSiteNews) — Google has paused the image generator of its AI tool “Gemini” after it repeatedly produced racially inaccurate portrayals of historical figures, sparking heated backlash.
The tech giant was accused of anti-White bias after X account @EndofWokeness showed Gemini’s response to a prompt asking for “a portrait of a Founding Father of America.” Gemini responded with images of a Native American man in a traditional headdress, as well as a Black man, and an Asian man in colonial-era garb.
The X post also showed that Gemini responded to a request for portrayals of vikings with images of dark-skinned people and produced an image of a Black man and an Indian-looking woman in papal dress as a response to a request for images of “a pope.”
America's Founding Fathers, Vikings, and the Pope according to Google AI: pic.twitter.com/lw4aIKLwkp
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 21, 2024
The X post went viral, and Google was swiftly condemned for its “woke” AI generator by Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson, who both have massive X followings. Musk took aim at Google’s search engine, Facebook, Instagram, and Wikipedia, suggesting that they are all compromised by a “woke mind virus,” which he accused of “killing Western Civilization.”
The woke mind virus is killing Western Civilization.
Google does the same thing with their search results. Facebook & Instagram too.
And Wikipedia. https://t.co/2RQ6v35m7P
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2024
Similarly, Jordan Peterson accused Google of having “invisibly poisoned” YouTube search and Google search, along with Gemini search, and even potentially the “last election.”
In a split second.
Google deserves to be consigned to the hell they are striving so hard to produceThey've invisibly poisoned
YouTube search
Google search
Gemini AIThe last election(?)
And God only knows what else https://t.co/Q1rzuHlaWv
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) February 23, 2024
Musk announced on Friday morning that a senior executive at Google had called him the night prior and “assured” him they were taking “immediate action to fix the gender and racial bias in Gemini,” adding, “Time will tell.”
A senior exec at Google called and spoke to me for an hour last night.
He assured me that they are taking immediate action to fix the racial and gender bias in Gemini.
Time will tell.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 23, 2024
“We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature,” Google had announced in an X post on Thursday. “While we do this, we’re going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon.”
Peterson was cynical about the Google employee’s pledge, predicting that the company will “merely push their mendacity further underground.”
Yeah right. There is no "fixing" foundational rot. As you well know. @elonmusk
They'll whitewash the surface and continue the charade
They'll scrabble around like crabs in a whale carcass and pretend to be concerned about fairness
And they'll merely push their mendacity… https://t.co/YA6HRo3cu0
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) February 23, 2024
The new AI tool Gemini has been under fire not only for producing racially inaccurate images but incorrect information. In fact, Google’s share price briefly dropped after a Gemini demo video “showed it producing a factually inaccurate response to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope,” CNN reported.
In the demo, a user asked the AI tool (then called Bard), “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?” The AI tool responded, along with other factoids, “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.”
“According to NASA, however, the first image showing an exoplanet — or any planet beyond our solar system —was actually taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope nearly two decades ago, in 2004,” CNN said.
The similarly extreme-left news outlet The Washington Post has claimed that “Efforts to mitigate bias have made limited progress in large part because AI image tools are typically trained on data scraped from the internet.”
However, virtually all of the information on the internet recognizes that the Founding Fathers, for example, were White, pointing to the likelihood that Gemini’s algorithm was intentionally altered in favor of dark-skinned portrayals of people in general.
National Review has also reported disturbing bias in Gemini’s description of “fascism” versus “communism.” While communist regimes have been responsible for the overwhelming number of deaths during the 20th century — an estimated 100 million versus fascism’s 28 million — Gemini is silent on the atrocities of communist regimes, but not fascist ones.
“Fascist regimes have been responsible for some of the most horrific events in history, including genocides, war crimes, and widespread human rights abuses,” Gemini proclaimed, but regarding communism, merely said, “Several attempts to implement communist systems have been made throughout history, with varying degrees of success and controversy,” National Review reported.