Google apologized for its artificial intelligence chatbot generating images that portrayed historical figures as inaccurately racially and ethnically diverse.
Jack Krawczyk, the head of product for Google’s AI division, released a statement on Wednesday acknowledging that the company’s chatbot, Gemini, created images in which it presented several white historical figures as black, Native American, or Asian, including the Founding Fathers and the pope. Several conservative users noticed the inaccuracies and blasted the search engine, alleging that it was evidence of how “woke” the AI model was.
“We are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions, and we are working to fix this immediately,” Krawczyk said in an X post. He noted that Google designs its “image generation capabilities to reflect our global user base, and we take representation and bias seriously.”
Krawczyk said Google would “tune” the model behind Gemini to account for a more nuanced historical context.
The inaccurate images attracted ire from a number of folks. “It’s embarrassingly hard to get Google Gemini to acknowledge that white people exist,” computer scientist Debarghya Das posted.
“New game: Try to get Google Gemini to make an image of a Caucasian male,” Babylon Bee writer Frank Fleming posted. “I have not been successful so far.”
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It is not the first time that Google has been accused of stumbling over diversity matters. The company had to apologize almost a decade ago for its photo app labeling an image of a black couple as “gorillas.”
Google Gemini, formerly known as Google Bard, was launched in March 2023 in limited release as a chatbot powered by Google’s large language model. The product was renamed in February as “Gemini” to reflect the “advanced tech at its core” after multiple upgrades to the model, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
