Back in February, Google paused its AI-powered chatbot Gemini’s ability to generate images of individuals after users complained of historical inaccuracies. Told to depict “a Roman legion,” for instance, Gemini would show an anachronistically diverse group of soldiers, while rendering “Zulu warriors” as uniformly Black.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologized, and Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google’s AI research division DeepMind, said that a fix should arrive “in very short order” — but we’re now well into May, and the promised fix has yet to seem.
Google touted loads of other Gemini features at its annual I/O developer conference this week, from custom chatbots to a vacation itinerary planner and integrations with Google Calendar, Keep and YouTube Music. But image generation of individuals continues to be switched off in Gemini apps on the net and mobile, confirmed a Google spokesperson.
So what’s the holdup? Well, the issue’s likely more complex than Hassabis alluded to.
The info sets used to coach image generators like Gemini’s generally contain more images of white people than people of other races and ethnicities, and the pictures of non-white people in those data sets reinforce negative stereotypes. Google, in an apparent effort to correct for these biases, implemented clumsy hardcoding under the hood so as to add diversity to queries where an individual’s appearance wasn’t specified. And now it’s struggling to suss out some reasonable middle path that avoids repeating history.
Will Google get there? Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any event, the drawn-out affair serves as a reminder that no fix for misbehaving AI is straightforward — especially when bias is at the basis of the misbehavior.
