Source: AFP
Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai on Tuesday criticized the “completely unacceptable” errors of its Gemini AI app, after blunders such as World War II images of different ethnic forces forced it to block users from creating photos of people.
The controversy came within weeks of the high-profile renaming of its ChatGPT-style AI to “Gemini,” giving the app unprecedented prominence in its products as it competes with OpenAI and backer Microsoft.
Social media users mocked and criticized Google for historically inaccurate images created by Gemini, such as US senators from the 1800s who 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 news site Semafor.
“I know some of his responses have offended our users and shown bias — to be clear, this is completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.”
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A Google spokesperson confirmed to AFP that the letter was authentic.
Pichai said Google teams were working around the clock to fix these issues, but did not say when the ability to create images would be available again.
“No AI is perfect, especially at this nascent stage of industry development, but we know the bar is high for us and we’ll keep it up for as long as it takes,” he wrote.
Tech companies see artificial intelligence production models as the next big step in computing and are scrambling to infuse them into everything from web search and customer support automation to music and art creation.
However, AI models, and not just Google’s, have long been criticized for perpetuating racial and gender biases in their results.
Google said last week that problematic responses from Gemini were the result of the company’s efforts to remove such biases.
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![](https://images.yen.com.gh/images/3b387bb843ca362d.jpg?impolicy=cropped-image&imwidth=256)
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Gemini was calibrated to show different people, but it didn’t adjust for prompts where it shouldn’t, and it was also getting too 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 overly conservative in others, leading to images that were embarrassing and wrong,” he said.
Many concerns about AI have arisen since the explosive success of ChatGPT.
Experts and governments have warned that AI also carries the risk of major economic upheaval, notably job displacement and industrial-scale disinformation that can manipulate elections and incite violence.
Source: AFP