Dispelling the Anti-White Bias in Google’s AI Model of Generating Images: Correction February 22nd, 6:54AM ET: Google has ceased testing of its AI model
Google’s decision to pause image generation of people in Gemini comes less than 24 hours after the company apologized for the inaccuracies in some historical images its AI model generated. Some users of the social network have asked for images of historical groups or figures, and found non-white people in the results. That’s led to conspiracy theories online that Google is intentionally avoiding depicting white people.
A request for a US senator from the 1800s that was included in the tests yesterday was returned with results that included Black and Native American women. The first female senator was a white woman in 1922, so Gemini’s AI images were essentially erasing the history of race and gender discrimination.
Correction February 22nd, 6:54AM ET: In the English language, image generation is available but not in the EU, UK, or Switzerland. That’s why testing failed from the UK.
Many right-wing commentators have jumped on the issue to suggest that this is another example of anti-white bias in Big Tech, with entrepreneur Mike Solana writing that he thought that GOOGLE’s AI is an anti-white lunatic.
“I think it is just lousy software,” Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at New York University and an AI entrepreneur, wrote on Wednesday on Substack.
Google launched its Gemini AI model two months ago as a rival to the dominant GPT model from OpenAI, which powers ChatGPT. The major update to it was released last week and allowed users to handle a lot of audio, text, and video input.
A Comment on a Post on X, Krawczyk, and the Role of Anti-woken Minds in Google Image Generation
In a post on X, Krawczyk explained the situation further, “We design our image generation capabilities to reflect our global user base, and we take representation and bias seriously.” We will continue to do this for open ended prompts (images of a person walking a dog are universal!) Historical contexts have more meaning and we will adjust to that.
But the issues Gemini produced were quickly leveraged by anti-woke crusaders online, who claimed variously that Google was “racist” or “infected with the woke mind virus.”