Gemini's Flawed AI Racial Images Seen As Warning Of Tech Titans' Power

For people at the trend-setting tech festival here, the scandal that erupted after Google's Gemini chatbot cranked out images of Black and Asian Nazi soldiers was seen as a warning about the power artificial intelligence can give tech titans.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai last month slammed as "completely unacceptable" errors by his company's Gemini AI app, after gaffes such as the images of ethnically diverse Nazi troops forced it to temporarily stop users from creating pictures of people.

Social media users mocked and criticized Google for the historically inaccurate images, like those showing a female black US senator from the 1800s -- when the first such senator was not elected until 1992.

"We definitely messed up on the image generation," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said at a recent AI "hackathon," adding that the company should have tested Gemini more thoroughly.

Folks interviewed at the popular South by Southwest arts and tech festival in Austin said the Gemini stumble highlights the inordinate power a handful of companies have over the artificial intelligence platforms that are poised to change the way people live and work.

"Essentially, it was too 'woke,'" said Joshua Weaver, a lawyer and tech entrepreneur, meaning Google had gone overboard in its effort to project inclusion and diversity.

Google quickly corrected its errors, but the underlying problem remains, said Charlie Burgoyne, chief executive of the Valkyrie applied science lab in Texas.

He equated Google's fix of Gemini to putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.

While Google long had the luxury of having time to refine its products, it is now scrambling in an AI race with Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and others, Weaver noted, adding, "They are moving faster than they know how to move."

Mistakes made in an effort at cultural sensitivity are flashpoints, particularly given the tense political divisions in the United States, a situation exacerbated by Elon Musk's X platform, the former Twitter.

"People on Twitter are very gleeful to celebrate any embarrassing thing that happens in tech," Weaver said, adding that reaction to the Nazi gaffe was "overblown."

The mishap did, however, call into question the degree of control those using AI tools have over information, he maintained.

In the coming decade, the amount of information -- or misinformation -- created by AI could dwarf that generated by people, meaning those controlling AI safeguards will have huge influence on the world, Weaver said.