Google’s Gemini was really bad in image generation. It was over-optimized to generate images that display people of color and females almost exclusively. Google had to pause image generation.
Gemini refused to generate images of a white person. According to Gemini, Indians could be ancient Greek philosophers, native Americans could be American revolutionaries, a black man and an East Asian woman could be German soldiers in WWII, and a woman could be a quarterback in American football, an all-male game. In a Reddit post, user u/hasanahmad put together the best displays of diversity in Gemini’s image generation and it’s simply hilarious. The post includes images showing Gemini outright refusing to generate a white couple, and being glad to help when asked to generate a black couple. Even “successful businessmen” are half women, and all happy men are non-white.
This overcompensation by Google could’ve been a step to protect itself from any backlash if Gemini ended up having a bias toward white men, so all the white men in Google’s headquarters decided it was a good idea (Google’s annual diversity report – PDF – on its workforce tells us that in its US offices, only 46.2% of people are white, down from 48.3% in 2022, which is not bad, maybe it was the 44.8% Asians or the 5.6% blacks that did this as a joke).
Google tweeted the following in response to the overcompensation:
The issue was picked up when people tried to generate images of classically white people, such as the founding fathers of America who are set in stone on Mount Rushmore. To this, Gemini would show blacks and native Americans and not a white person a single time.
Verge reports that they found Gemini giving them pictures of black and native American women when they asked for pictures of … wait for it … a US Senator from the 1800s (for context, the North Atlantic slave trade reached its peak in the 1780s, scary close to the black and native American US senators residing in the US who did absolutely nothing about it).
Then, Google apologized and within a day, paused image generation entirely. Let’s see how soon can they make Gemini more racist normal, shouldn’t take too long really.
