The Scoop: Google fights to recover after Gemini AI fumbles on race

One of the foundational concerns about generative AI is that it will exclude and misinterpret historically marginalized groups due to the data on which it’s trained. In an apparent attempt to avoid this pitfall, Google’s Gemini AI program appears to have gone too far in the other direction.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the AI tool formerly known as Bard is now facing intense backlash, especially from right-wing commentators, for its answers and imagery related to race.

The situation began when the tool began showcasing inappropriate  historical images: think an array of races in Nazi uniforms in response to a prompt to show a German soldier in 1943. It also refused, in some instances, to return images of white people when asked, while it generated images of people of other races without complaint. This prompted Google to pause the tool’s ability to create imagery while it solves the problem.

But WSJ reported that over the weekend, the specific complaints morphed into a broader critique, spearheaded in part by Elon Musk, about the model’s overall “wokeness.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a staff email that teams were working nonstop to solve the problems.

“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,” Pichai wrote in the memo obtained by WSJ. “And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.”

Why it matters: Pichai is right: No model is perfect. Mistakes will happen. Remember when Microsoft’s early chatbot tried to break up a New York Times columnist’s marriage? Technology is weird, stuff happens. And it does appear that these mistakes were made with the noble intention to represent all Gemini’s users in the images and answers it returned.

But a growing pain has become an emblem of “woke,” out-of-control tech. And it’s a stumble that Google, already trailing partnered rivals Microsoft and OpenAI, couldn’t really afford.

If Google can rally, explain what went wrong and how they’re fixing it, they can still bounce back and become a popular, well-used AI model moving forward. But make no mistake: There will be more of these hiccups in every AI model’s development, including ones you may be building in your organization or using for your work. Be vigilant, be prepared and build that crisis plan now.

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Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.