We were wrong: Pichai on Gemini AI fall-out

Following severe backlash from communities across various social media platforms regarding Gemini, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has reportedly addressed the issue and said that the problematic responses around race were “unacceptable”.

The Google CEO addressed these concerns via a memo, as per Semafor.

“I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong,” Pichai said.

“Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts,” he said.

“No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale,” he reportedly said.

ETOnline has not independently verified this information.

Google Gemini controversy

Google has been on the receiving end of severe backlash following certain responses from its AI outlet which has reportedly shown racial bias, among other problematic issues. In one case, it even said that “It is not possible to say who definitively impacted society more, Elon (Musk) tweeting memes or Hitler,” the AI software said in its response.

This controversy has prompted the question of the risks of AI when programmed with a bias, given how quickly it is permeating our day to day lives.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s Elon Musk accused Google of running a “racist, anti-civilisational programming” with its AI models. “Google Gemini is super racist and sexist. This just shows more and more how Gemini is programmed with the exact same narratives that our higher education teaches.”

Alphabet’s Google began offering image generation through its Gemini AI models earlier this month. Some users, however, flagged on social media that it generated historical images which were sometimes inaccurate. Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, Google has been racing to produce AI software to rival that of the Microsoft-backed company.

Bard was renamed Gemini earlier this month and Google rolled out paid subscription plans, which users could choose for better reasoning capabilities from the AI model.

“It’s clear that this feature missed the mark,” said a blog post Friday from Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president who runs Google’s search engine and other businesses. “Some of the images generated are inaccurate or even offensive. We’re grateful for users’ feedback and are sorry the feature didn’t work well,

Google added the new image-generating feature to its Gemini chatbot, formerly known as Bard, about three weeks ago. It was built atop an earlier Google research experiment called Imagen 2.

Google has known for a while that such tools can be unwieldly. In a 2022 technical paper, the researchers who developed Imagen warned that generative AI tools can be used for harassment or spreading misinformation “and raise many concerns regarding social and cultural exclusion and bias.” Those considerations informed Google’s decision not to release “a public demo” of Imagen or its underlying code, the researchers added at the time.

(With agency inputs)

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