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‘We definitely messed up’: why did Google AI tool make offensive historical images?

Experts say Gemini was not thoroughly tested, after image generator depicted variety of historical figures as people of colour

Brin’s comments, at an AI “hackathon” event on 2 March, follow a slew of social media posts showing Gemini’s image generation tool depicting a variety of historical figures – including popes, founding fathers of the US and, most excruciatingly, German second world war soldiers – as people of colour. The pictures, as well as Gemini chatbot responses that vacillated over whether libertarians or Stalin had caused the greater harm, led to an explosion of negative commentary from figures such as Elon Musk who saw it as another front in the culture wars. Dame Wendy Hall, a professor of computer science at the University of Southampton and a member of the UN’s advisory body on AI, says Google was under pressure to respond to OpenAI’s runaway success with ChatGPT and Dall-E and simply did not test the technology thoroughly enough.

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