The controversy surrounding the app exploded last week after the likes of
Tim Pool,
Matt Walsh, and other rightwing cretins noticed that Gemini was really, really bad at producing images of white people. Most notably, prompts for “Viking pictures”
spawned a series of images of ethnically diverse Vikings but could not consistently produce images of European ones. Other, similar prompts—like attempts to produce images of America’s Founding Fathers or the Pope—produced similarly historically inaccurate results.
This caused people like Walsh
to say stuff like: “It is practically impossible to get this product to serve up an image of someone with white skin.”
I’d love to be able to tell you that Walsh and others of his ilk are exaggerating but, based on my own experience with Gemini, I have to conclude that they are, basically, correct about the AI’s weird resistance to European representation. Indeed, I logged onto the app last week and attempted to recreate the disparities that right-wingers were whining about. It soon became apparent that it was incredibly easy to use Gemini to generate an image of someone who was ethnically “diverse,” but that it was almost impossible to get the bot to consistently create a picture of a “white person.”
The app ran into the most controversy when it came to its historical representations. As previously noted, the initial scandal was spurred by Gemini’s depictions of Black Vikings, but the company
really got into trouble when someone asked it to create images of Nazis. Indeed, true to form, the chatbot
created images of “racially diverse” —they were Black—Nazis. Google later apologized for the “embarrassing and wrong” images.
