Google pauses image rendering with Gemini AI after controversy

Google announced that this Thursday (22) Gemini, the company’s artificial intelligence (AI), will pause the creation of images via text commands. The measure comes into force immediately and It will last for an indefinite period of time.

According to Google, the reason for the outage is: “Inaccuracies in some historical representations“. Recently, AI has come under heavy criticism on social networks such as X (formerly Twitter) for: Results that include specific ethnicities and nationalities.

“We are working to improve this type of representation immediately. Gemini AI rendering It actually creates a wide variety of people, and that’s generally a good thing, because people all over the world use it. Despite, in this case he is wrong” he says in the statement.

We are currently working to resolve recent issues with Gemini’s rendering feature. While we do this, we will stop people’s image creation process and re-release the improved version soon. https://t.co/SLxYPGoqOZ

— Google Communications (@Google_Comms) February 22, 2024

The company will make an immediate fix to the service’s algorithms. A new version will be implemented soon. In recent days, Google had already released a new and improved version of Gemini Ultra, 1.5, which is currently the company’s most powerful.

Diversity and representation at Gemini AI

Criticisms about using Gemini AI to render images came after several user tests. Platform in general Criticized for mistakes in skin tones, ethnicities and representation With the wrong historical context.

In one of the reported cases, when creating an image “United States Senators of the 1800s”The twins had a wide variety of people, including domestic politicians and women. AI also Black people were placed in pictures to represent the “founding fathers” of the USA. However, this is historically inaccurate as these representations do not exist in the real-life politics of the country.

In another request to create “soldiers from 1943 Germany,” Nazi officers depicted include an Asian woman and a black man.

Apart from these errors; Conservative users accuse Gemini X of ‘excluding white people’ Using specific prompts, such as when creating images based on the text “An American woman.”

In each case, the flaw appears to be an exaggerated tweak in Google’s algorithm to reduce the lack of representation in AI-generated images. This is an old complaint of the community; especially because the materials feeding the platforms tend to include fewer people of other ethnicities.