Social media users criticized Google for the historically inaccurate Gemini-generated images. (File)
San Francisco:
Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday denounced “completely unacceptable” flaws in its Gemini AI app, after blunders such as images of ethnically diverse World War II Nazi troops forced the app to stop users from taking photos of people.
The controversy emerged within weeks of Google's high-profile rebranding of its ChatGPT-style AI to “Gemini”, giving the app unprecedented prominence in its products as it competes with OpenAI and its backer Microsoft.
Social media users mocked and criticized Google for its historically inaccurate Gemini-generated images, such as 19th century U.S. Senators that were ethnically diverse and included women.
“I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app,” Pichai wrote in a letter to staff, which was published by the news website Semafor.
“I know some of the comments have offended our users and shown bias. To be clear, that is completely unacceptable and we are wrong.”
A Google spokesperson confirmed to AFP that the letter was authentic.
Pichai said Google teams were working “around the clock” to resolve these issues, but did not say when the image generation feature would be available again.
“No AI is perfect, especially at this nascent stage of industry development, but we know the bar is set high for us and we will keep working on it no matter how long it takes,” he wrote.
Tech companies see generative artificial intelligence models as the next big thing in computing and are rushing to integrate them into everything from web searching and automating customer support to creating music and art.
But AI models, and not just Google's, have long been criticized for perpetuating racial and gender bias in their results.
Google said last week that Gemini's problematic responses were the result of the company's efforts to remove such biases.
Gemini was calibrated to show a variety of people, but didn't adjust for prompts where it shouldn't, and also became overly cautious with some otherwise innocuous requests, Google's Prabhakar Raghavan wrote in a blog post.
“These two things caused the model to overcompensate in some cases and be overconservative in others, leading to images that were embarrassing and wrong,” he said.
Since the explosive success of ChatGPT, many concerns about AI have arisen.
Experts and governments have warned that AI also poses the risk of major economic turmoil, especially job losses, and industrial-scale disinformation that could manipulate elections and fuel violence.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
