On Friday morning, when I first sat down to write this column, Google’s new Gemini AI was having problems that seemed mostly amusing. The internet had discovered that it would generally refuse to create pictures of any all-White groups, even in situations where it was clearly called for, such as “draw a picture of Nazis.” Gemini also insisted on gender diversity, even when drawing popes. But this insistence on diversity ran in only one direction: It was willing to draw female popes, or homogenous groups of people of color. Suddenly, everyone on social media seemed to be provoking Gemini to produce crazy images and posting the results. On Thursday morning, Google shut down the image-generation feature. This did not solve the problem. The blunder was understandable. When building a large language model, or LLM, you have to deal with the risk that when someone asks to see, say, a doctor, the chatbot will produce images that are less diverse than reality — for example, betting that a doctor should be White or Asian, because a majority of U.S. doctors are. That would be inaccurate, and might discourage Black and Hispanic kids from aspiring to become doctors, so architects use various methods to make them more representative, and maybe, judging from Gemini’s output, a little aspirationally overrepresentative. A human graphics editor does this kind of thing automatically. But this kind of judgment is hard to cultivate, which is why it takes decades for a human to become an adult who instinctively knows it’s a good idea to diversify images of doctors, but not of Nazis. Google, facing a major threat to its core business model, and presumably eager to get a product out before ChatGPT gobbled up more of the AI market share, perhaps rushed out a model that isn’t yet fully “grown up.” And on the scale of things, “draws too many Black founding fathers” isn’t much of a problem.
Full opinion : Google’s Gemini AI exposes tech’s left-leaning biases and underscores a more serious ethical problem.
