In light of embarrassing AI image generation failures at Google (all of which were in one direction), Google announced it has shut down Gemini AI’s image generation are least aspects of its image generation. Today I created some text prompts to Gemini to gauge its answers. Similar problems to the original image generation were present in some of the answers. It was obvious Google adjusted some tuning knobs to influence the output – these errors in output were not a natural byproduct of their AI but were curated to do this.
But as the following post notes, the root cause was not technology – but people at Google:
The Gemini AI system refused to generate images of white people, but generated images of BIPOC with abandon, drawing pictures of historical illustrations (Popes, Vikings, Queens of England) as BIPOC. I asked Gemini AI to draw the crew of a 19th century pirate ship – they included highly sexualized women, one of which was wearing high heels (really?) I asked it to draw pictures of airline pilots and about the first ten images it drew were of women airline pilots – even though women make up 8% of airline pilots in the U.S. These bizarre outputs were tuned into Gemini AI – they did not happen accidentally.
This gives rise to the conspiracy theories that Google is a propaganda and censorship operation. We know they responded to government requests on “misinformation” (YouTube censors things all the time) to remove or demonetize content.
We know that in the past, Google’s Street View cars were collecting Wi-Fi data as they drove around neighborhoods, including private information. They then blamed this on a “software error” – they were literally collected many terabytes of data and had been doing this for years – and we are to believe no one noticed?
Gmail scanned your email for the purpose of creating a dossier on you for advertising purposes: Google will stop scanning content of personal emails | Gmail | The Guardian
Google’s GMail was scanning email and attachments for double wrong think – and locked people out of their accounts if your private email was judged “abusive”: Users denied access to their own Google Docs for “violating terms of service” – Social Panic (coldstreams.com)
Update: The media spin is hilarious:
