"That was a bug"- Google CEO admits Gemini was racist

Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, flat-out admitted that they messed up. They used the filter in cases where they shouldn't have.

I opened up YouTube this morning to see what’s new in the world of artificial intelligence. One video caught my eye — Bloomberg’s Emily Chang interviewing Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

The 25-minute interview covered a wide range of topics related to the future of AI, but what really struck a chord with me was Pichai’s admission about a critical bug in Gemini’s Imagen 2 image generator that resulted in the creation of racist images.

Emily asked Pichai about Gemini making pictures of Asian Nazis and Black founding fathers. She said if you look at real founding father pics, it’s all old white dudes. Here’s the transcript:

Emily: The images that Gemini initially generated of Asian Nazis and Black founding fathers, you’ve said that was unacceptable. If you look at any pictures of the founding fathers, you’re seeing old white men.

People are calling this woke AI, and it’s not just happening here, it’s happening across the industry.

How did the model generate something that it never saw?

Screenshot from Bloomberg’s YouTube channel

He flat-out admitted that they messed up. They used the filter in cases where they shouldn’t have.

Sundar: We are a company which serves products to users around the world, and there are generic questions.

For example, people come and say, “Show me images of school teachers, or doctors, or nurses.” We have people asking this query from Indonesia or the US, right? How do you get it right for our global user base?

Obviously, the mistake was that we overapplied, including cases where it should have never applied. So that was the bug, and, you know, so we got it wrong.

I’ve always had a particular fascination with AI image generators, so when Google announced Imagen 2 and its integration into the Gemini Advanced chatbot, I was one of the first to eagerly dive in and write a review.

In one of my review articles for Gemini Advanced, I tried to generate an image of black people riding a bike:

Prompt: generate an image of black couple riding a bike

Image by Jim Clyde Monge

Gemini refused to generate the image but when I tweaked the prompt to generate white people instead of black, it created an image without hesitation.

Image by Jim Clyde Monge

Why the heck would Gemini do that?

Check out the full context of my review here:

Other AI tools like Midjourney will make that black couple pic just fine.