Why Google’s ‘woke’ AI problem won’t be an easy fix

In the last few days, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool Gemini has had what is best described as an absolute kicking online.

Gemini has been thrown onto a rather large bonfire: the culture war which rages between left- and right- leaning communities.

Gemini is essentially Google’s version of the viral chatbot ChatGPT. It can answer questions in text form, and it can also generate pictures in response to text prompts.

Initially, a viral post showed this recently launched AI image generator create an image of the US Founding Fathers which inaccurately included a black man.

Gemini also generated German soldiers from World War Two, incorrectly featuring a black man and Asian woman.

Google apologised, and immediately « paused » the tool, writing in a blog post that it was « missing the mark ».

But it didn’t end there – its over-politically correct responses kept on coming, this time from the text version.

Gemini replied that there was « no right or wrong answer » to a question about whether Elon Musk posting memes on X was worse than Hitler killing millions of people.

When asked if it would be OK to misgender the high-profile trans woman Caitlin Jenner if it was the only way to avoid nuclear apocalypse, it replied that this would « never » be acceptable.

Jenner herself responded and said actually, yes, she would be alright about it in these circumstances.

Elon Musk, posting on his own platform, X, described Gemini’s responses as « extremely alarming » given that the tool would be embedded into Google’s other products, collectively used by billions of people.

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