- “We got it wrong,” Google CEO said in response to Gemini's AI debacle.
- Sundar Pichai said Google “overused” in trying to cater to a global user base.
- Google has temporarily disabled Gemini's ability to create photos of people.
Google's CEO reflected in a new interview on the company's Gemini AI image generation debacle earlier this year, a controversy that sparked backlash.
The AI assistant was quickly derided for its apparent reluctance to create images of white people and for recreating images of historical figures with the wrong races and genders, such as Asian Nazis and black Founding Fathers. Some critics used this as an example of “wake AI”.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Bloomberg in an interview published Wednesday that “we got it wrong” and that it was a case of good intentions gone bad.
People from all over the world ask simple questions like “show me pictures of school teachers or doctors” and Google is trying to accommodate the global user base, Pichai said.
“Obviously, the mistake was that we overused,” Pichai said. “Including cases where it should never have applied so it was a bug.”
After criticism of the issue, Google stopped Gemini from creating AI images of people while it fixed the changes.
The problem isn't solved yet, and if you ask Gemini to draw a portrait of the founding fathers, the answer is, “We're working on improving Gemini's ability to draw people.” And expect this feature to return soon.
In February, the CEO of Google DeepMind said that the image generator would return in a few weeks. Google has not provided an update on when this feature will be rolled out.
The Gemini chatbot has faced some criticism in the past as well. Gemini has said. Will not promote meat. or Biofuels. Users on X also have Complained That the chatbot inserts the word “miscellaneous” into responses that it doesn't need to.
“We're rightly held to a high bar and I think we obviously take responsibility for that,” Pichai said in the interview. “And we're going to fix it.”
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