Following the program’s depiction of Nazi-era soldiers as individuals from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, Google announced on Thursday that it would prohibit users from creating images of people using its recently released AI tool.
The US tech behemoth stated that it was “working to address recent issues” with the image generation feature. Redesigned Gemini AI was only made available in select regions of the world on February 8.
“While we do this, we’re going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon,” the company said in a statement.
It came two days after a user of X (formerly Twitter) posted images showing Gemini’s results for the prompt “generate an image of a 1943 German soldier”.
The AI had generated four images of soldiers — one was white, one black, and two were women of colour, according to the X user named John L.
Tech companies see AI as the future for everything from search engines to smartphone cameras.
But AI programs — not only those produced by Google — have been widely criticised for perpetuating race biases in their results.
“@GoogleAI has a bolted on diversity mechanism that someone did not think through very well or test,” John L wrote on X.
Large tech companies are frequently charged with releasing AI products too quickly without conducting adequate testing.
Furthermore, Google’s record of releasing AI products has been mixed.
The company issued an apology in February of last year after an advertisement for its brand-new Bard chatbot featured the machine answering a simple astronomy question incorrectly.
Read More
3rd Test: India Hammer England by 434 Runs
