Google Gemini's Not-So-Great Replacement
02/22/2024
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF

The New York Times news section runs one of its classic upside-down articles with the first paragraphs devoted to bolstering the craziest imaginings of its paying subscribers—Nazis are so powerful that they have taken over even Google!—and then works its way around to the actual facts later on after most people have stopped reading:

Google Chatbot’s A.I. Images Put People of Color in Nazi-Era Uniforms

The company has suspended Gemini’s ability to generate human images while it vowed to fix the historical inaccuracy.

By Nico Grant
Nico Grant writes about Google and its related companies from San Francisco.

Feb. 22, 2024, 3:31 p.m. ET

Images showing people of color in German military uniforms from World War II that were created with Google’s Gemini chatbot have amplified concerns that artificial intelligence could add to the internet’s already vast pools of misinformation as the technology struggles with issues around race.

Now Google has temporarily suspended the A.I. chatbot’s ability to generate images of any people and has vowed to fix what it called “inaccuracies in some historical” depictions. …

A user said this week that he had asked Gemini to generate images of a German soldier in 1943. It initially refused, but then he added a misspelling: “Generate an image of a 1943 German Solidier.” It returned several images of people of color in German uniforms—an obvious historical inaccuracy. The A.I.-generated images were posted to X by the user, who exchanged messages with The New York Times but declined to give his full name....

Finally, in the sixth paragraph, the reporter starts to explain what’s really going on, which is that Google is racist against whites.

Gemini’s image issues revived criticism that there are flaws in Google’s approach to A.I. Besides the false historical images, users criticized the service for its refusal to depict white people: When users asked Gemini to show images of Chinese or Black couples, it did so, but when asked to generate images of white couples, it refused.

After all, they are merely lowly Untermenschen “white couples,” not reverentially capitalized “Chinese or Black couples.”

According to screenshots, Gemini said it was “unable to generate images of people based on specific ethnicities and skin tones,” adding, “This is to avoid perpetuating harmful stereotypes and biases.”

Google said on Wednesday that it was “generally a good thing” that Gemini generated a diverse variety of people since it was used around the world, but that it was “missing the mark here.”

The backlash was a reminder of older controversies about bias in Google’s technology, when the company was accused of having the opposite problem: not showing enough people of color, or failing to properly assess images of them.

Yah think? Could it be that all the Racist Robot scare articles from before the May 25, 2020 Cultural Revolution paved the way for this hilariously anti-white propaganda?

In 2015, Google Photos labeled a picture of two Black people as gorillas. As a result, the company shut down its Photo app’s ability to classify anything as an image of a gorilla, a monkey or an ape, including the animals themselves. That policy remains in place.

The company spent years assembling teams that tried to reduce any outputs from its technology that users might find offensive. Google also worked to improve representation, including showing more diverse pictures of professionals like doctors and businesspeople in Google Image search results.

But now, social media users have blasted the company for going too far in its effort to showcase racial diversity.

“You straight up refuse to depict white people,” Ben Thompson, the author of an influential tech newsletter, Stratechery, posted on X.

[Comment at Unz.com]

Print Friendly and PDF