The gaffes and biases of Google Gemini
What a week Google’s artificial intelligence tool Gemini has had. First, the Gemini image generator was shut down after it produced images of Nazi soldiers that were bafflingly, ahistorically diverse, as if black and Asian people had been part of the Wehrmacht. Gemini’s intent may have been admirable — to counteract the biases typical in large language models that rely on data sets and so can reproduce stereotypes — but its execution was dumb, even offensive.
And then its text-based counterpart outraged U.S. conservatives, many of whom accused it of treating Republican politicians and even right-leaning journalists more negatively than their Democrat counterparts. Peter J. Hasson — a Fox News editor who wrote a book in 2020 about Big Tech's political bias — revealed that Gemini had even actively manipulated information, citing fake reviews and making up quotes, to denigrate his book.
And what of the rest of the world? Last week, for instance, when asked by a popular Indian writer and columnist if Narendra Modi was a fascist, Gemini responded that the Indian prime minister had "been accused of implementing policies that some experts have characterized as fascist." This led another Indian editor to claim that Gemini was "not just woke" but "downright malicious" and to call on the government to respond, which Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a minister in the Modi government, duly did, warning Google that its AI tool had violated "several provisions of the Criminal Code."
Google, perhaps fearing the wrath of the Indian government, said in a statement that Gemini might "not always be reliable, especially when it comes to responding to some prompts about current events, political topics, or evolving news." Why did Google back down so quickly? Gemini's answer to the question was reasonable and measured. Modi, after all, by some standards can and has been described as an autocrat. Under his watch, the press is less free, the political opposition is often criminalized and religious minorities are suppressed.