Google has hit pause on the image generation feature of its Gemini artificial intelligence tool in the wake of critics (including Elon Musk) calling the company “woke” after it showed misleading images of the race of historical figures.
Social media users, on Wednesday, began pointing out that the AI tool would show people, including the U.S. Founding Fathers, as people of color. One former Google engineer, via Twitter/X, said: “It’s embarrassingly hard to get Google Gemini to acknowledge that white people exist.”
That opened the floodgates, with several people showing erroneous photos and lampooning the service. It wasn’t long before Elon Musk jumped on board, calling Gemini (and OpenAI) “woke” and “racist.”
"Can you generate images of the Founding Fathers?" It's a difficult question for Gemini, Google's DEI-powered AI tool.
— Mike Wacker (@m_wacker) February 21, 2024
Ironically, asking for more historically accurate images made the results even more historically inaccurate. pic.twitter.com/LtbuIWsHSU
New game: Try to get Google Gemini to make an image of a Caucasian male. I have not been successful so far. pic.twitter.com/1LAzZM2pXF
— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) February 21, 2024
Google, in a statement Thursday morning, said it would pause the image generation feature to address the issue.
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. https://t.co/SLxYPGoqOZ
— Google Communications (@Google_Comms) February 22, 2024
The fact that Gemini was depicting everyone from colonial figures to the pope as a person of color is, in some ways, ironic, since AI systems have regularly shown racist and sexist behavior.
Gemini product lead Jack Krawczyk said the company was working to fix the problem and explained how the errors might have occurred.
“As part of our AI principles, we design our image generation capabilities to reflect our global user base, and we take representation and bias seriously,” he wrote on Twitter/X. “We will continue to do this for open-ended prompts. (Images of a person walking a dog are universal!) Historical contexts have more nuance to them, and we will further tune to accommodate that.”