Google has temporarily stopped its Gemini Artificial Intelligence chatbot from generating images of people. This comes a day after the tech giant apologized for “inaccuracies” in historical images created by the chatbot.
After Google released its revamped Gemini in some parts of the world on February 8, some users posted screenshots on social media earlier this week showing how the chatbot inaccurately depicted white-dominated scenes with racially diverse characters.
For example, the Gemini AI chatbot depicted Nazi-era troops as people from different ethnic backgrounds.
The results generated by the tool led to criticism and questions about whether the company over-adjusted for the risk of racial bias in its AI model.
What did Google say about the controversy?
Shortly after the controversy, Google released a statement on X (formerly Twitter), saying: “We are already working to resolve recent issues with Gemini's image generation feature. While we do this, we're going to pause our human image generation and will re-release an improved version soon.
We are already working on resolving recent issues with Gemini's image generation feature. While we do this, we're going to pause our human image generation and will re-release an improved version soon. https://t.co/SLxYPGoqOZ
— Google Communications (@Google_Comms) February 22, 2024
Earlier, on Thursday, Google said the team was aware that Gemini was offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation images.
It added: “We are working to immediately improve these types of images. Gemini's AI image generation generates a wide range of people. And that's generally a good thing, because people all over the world use it. But it misses the point.”
We are aware that Gemini offers inaccuracies in some historical image generation images. Here is our statement. pic.twitter.com/RfYXSgRyfz
— Google Communications (@Google_Comms) February 21, 2024
What is Google Gemini AI?
Gemini, formerly known as the Bard chatbot, is the latest addition to an ever-expanding field of artificial intelligence.
It is a family of multimodal large language models designed for understanding language, audio, code and video.
Powered by the Imagen 2 model, the Gemini AI chatbot allows users to generate high-quality images with text prompts.
Google officially released the Gemini AI on December 6 last year. Because it integrates natural language processing and image recognition, Gemini enables tasks such as image captioning and complex visual parsing. It does not require any external OCR tools.