Google said Thursday it would pause its Gemini chatbot's image creation tool after it was widely criticized on social media for creating “diverse” images that weren't historically or factually accurate — such as black Vikings, Native American popes and female NHL players.
Users have criticized Gemini as “ridiculously woke” and “unusable” after requests to create representational images of subjects such as America's Founding Fathers resulted in strangely retouched images.
“We are already working to address recent issues with Gemini's photo creation feature,” Google said in a statement posted on X. “While we do this, we will pause the creation of images for people and will re-release an improved version soon.”
Examples included an AI image of a black man who appears to represent George Washington, with a white wig and Continental Army uniform, and a Southeast Asian woman wearing a papal garb even though all 266 popes throughout history have been white men.
In one horrific example Detected by the edgeGemini even produced “diverse” representations of Nazi-era German soldiers, including an Asian woman and a black man in uniform in 1943.
Google had previously admitted that the erroneous behavior of the chatbot needed to be fixed.
“We're improving these types of images immediately,” Jack Krawczyk, Google's senior director of product management for Gemini experiences, told The Post.
“Gemini's AI image generation generates for a wide range of people. This is generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it misses the mark here.”
The Post has reached out to Google for further comment.
This was a big misstep on the part of Google, which just rebranded its flagship AI chatbot product as Gemini earlier this month and introduced much-touted new features — including photo creation.
The blunder also came days after OpenAI, which powers the popular ChatGPT, introduced a new AI tool called Sora that creates videos based on users' text prompts.
Since Google has not published the standards that govern the behavior of the Gemini chatbot, it is difficult to get a clear explanation for why it invents various versions of historical figures and events.
When asked by The Post to provide its trust and safety guidelines, Gemini acknowledged that they had not been “publicly disclosed due to technical complexities and intellectual property considerations.”
The chatbot also admitted that it was aware of “criticism that Gemini may have prioritized forced diversity in image generation, resulting in historically inaccurate depictions.”
“The algorithms behind the image generation models are complex and still under development,” Gemini said. “They may have difficulty understanding the nuances of historical context and cultural representation, leading to inaccurate outputs.”
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