Google says the company is working to immediately fix Gemini's “inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions”, after some users complained

Controversy is swirling around Google's generative AI tool Gemini as some users complain that its historical depictions are not accurate.

PCMag 2024-02-22 Kate Irwin

Context & Ripple Effects

This complaint arrives after users had already flagged Gemini Pro's difficulty with controversial topics, factual errors and coding tasks in December, making image-generation accuracy part of a broader question about the product's reliability rather than an isolated visual-output issue.

The immediate remediation path was soon made concrete through Google's pause on Gemini people-image generation, while its later explanation pointed to image tuning that overcompensated for safety concerns. The episode matters because historical imagery makes a model's balancing of representation and factual fidelity highly visible.

First-order effects

Google must revise Gemini's image-generation behavior and address user confidence in its historical depictions; people-image generation is being paused while the company works on an improved release.
Gemini users lose or face disruption in a prominent image-creation use case while Google prioritizes correcting the reported inaccuracies.

Second-order effects

The incident raises the bar for rival image-model providers to demonstrate that bias mitigations do not replace historical accuracy with blanket or distorted outputs.
For Google, the repair effort turns safety tuning into a product-quality issue: changes designed to reduce harmful bias require more explicit evaluation across sensitive, real-world prompts.

Third-order effects

Generative-image products are likely to move toward more formal governance of high-sensitivity prompts, where providers must manage factual fidelity and representation together rather than treat them as separate objectives.
If repeated public corrections persist, trust in general-purpose generation may depend increasingly on transparent limits, testing practices and narrower deployment choices for historically grounded content.

The trend: This is one data point in governed generation, as AI vendors learn that safety interventions must be evaluated for accuracy and usability as well as harm reduction.

Discussion

@crumbler Casey Newton on threads
Saw that Google Gemini was generating a diverse group of people when asked to show the ‘founding fathers’ and it's like yessss LLM Manuel Miranda.
@jackk Jack Krawczyk on x
We are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions, and we are working to fix this immediately. As part of our AI principles https://ai.google/..., we design our image generation capabilities to reflect our global user base, and we...
@debarghya_das Deedy on x
It's embarrassingly hard to get Google Gemini to acknowledge that white people exist [image]
@id_aa_carmack John Carmack on x
The AI behavior guardrails that are set up with prompt engineering and filtering should be public — the creators should proudly stand behind their vision of what is best for society and how they crystallized it into commands and code. I suspect many are actually ashamed. The...
@google_comms @google_comms on x
We're aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions. Here's our statement. [image]
@davidrozado David Rozado on x
After 49 attempts requesting Google's Gemini to generate a portrait of a physicists from the 17th century, the portrait on the bottom right is the closest I've got to someone who somewhat resembles Isaac Newton or Galileo Galilei. I think this example illustrates the need for... …
@basedtorba Andrew Torba on x
24 hours ago Google/Gemini's senior product director said “all your answers look correct” when presented with the anti-White bias of Gemini. Now he's apologizing on Fox News after we made the results go viral. [image]
@mostlypeacefull @mostlypeacefull on x
When you ask Google Gemini to generate a white guy [image]
@anothercohen Alex Cohen on x
I asked Google Gemini to generate an image of famous leaders from Ghana [image]
@stevesi Steven Sinofsky on x
The real question (not really a question) is given this self-portrait what does this say about the general algorithmic search results of the past two decades?
@johnlu0x John L. on x
This is not good. #googlegemini [image]
@micsolana Mike Solana on x
from the team that brought you “fire bombing waymos is a time honored part of the human experience” comes brand new hit “literally erasing white people from human history is racist against non-white people” [image]
@smtuffy Sean Tuffy on x
Were some of images produced by Google Gemini very silly? Yes Was the 24 freakout by the anti-DEI brigade completely embarrassing? Also yes
@paulg Paul Graham on x
The ridiculous images generated by Gemini aren't an anomaly. They're a self-portrait of Google's bureaucratic corporate culture.
@razibkhan @razibkhan on x
google is imposing american racial hang-ups on the rest of the world. it has nothing to do with the global user base. no one in africa or asia cares about the harmful effect of seeing a white family. this guy is paid a lot to lie [image]
@vocalcry Circe on x
Ah, yes, famous Google founders Larry Pang and Sergey Bing [image]
@elonmusk Elon Musk on x
Perhaps it is now clear why @xAI's Grok is so important. It is far from perfect right now, but will improve rapidly. V1.5 releases in 2 weeks. Rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to criticism, has never been more essential.
@razibkhan @razibkhan on x
why the fuck did u green light this abomination r u a moron? (Sorry for the hurtful and non inclusive language. oops)
@benthompson Ben Thompson on x
Hot fix being applied. [image]
@autismcapital @autismcapital on x
It's hilarious that the only way to have provoked a response from Google (BEGRUDGINGLY) was to use their own woke DEI tools against them. If Gemini forces mandatory race changing, what happens when you ask for German 1940's soldiers? How does Google deal with the fact that their.…
@uubzu @uubzu on x
If I released something this big and John Carmack said “I suspect many are actually ashamed” about my team, I would go shopping at the rope store Hey Gemini team! If you aren't ashamed, you are literally shameless
@natesilver538 Nate Silver on x
The overt political orientation of Google Gemini is really something. Here's another example I've seen from various people in the timeline, with comparison to ChatGPT. I'm not a big Middle East Takes guy but it's really, uh, different. Gemini on left, ChatGPT on right. [image]
@stevesi Steven Sinofsky on x
One of the weird things that _appears_ to be happening with major commercial LLMs is that they are producing lesser answers, more excuses, and yet no fewer hallucinations. Trying to imagine if “fear” had overtaken the PC, internet, or mobile and caused makers do less not more?
@austen @austen on x
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to... do this? [image]
@thecaptain_nemo Nemo on x
i asked google gemini to generate an image of the canadian prime minister [image]
@stablequan @stablequan on x
From Gemma Technical Report [image]
@basedtorba Andrew Torba on x
Someone got Google's Gemini to leak its woke prompt injection process and guess what: it works exactly as I described it below earlier today. [image]
@indian_bronson @indian_bronson on x
It's not enough for everyone to dunk on Google Gemini Other competitors which don't police in the same way or which stop doing that need to make their lack of censorship and nannying a selling point and they need to profit for having done so IFF that happens - it's game over
@carnage4life Dare Obasanjo on x
The injected races in Gemini prompts where Google seems to have explicitly configured it not to ever generate a set of white people will fade from memory. But the realization that Google is now unable to build good product features when perfect execution matters most will not.
@realmemes6 @realmemes6 on x
Had to try out Gemini, it's true. Don't know if they've made changes but for me it mostly wouldn't even try to make images that might have white people in them. Does the same with text, look at what it says about white people, lol. [image]
@stevesi Steven Sinofsky on x
Some of the problems people are seeing with Gemini not offering answers seems (at least for me) to stem from using what amount to trigger words like create, make, generate versus lookup words like show, find, display. Those trigger words also cause hallucinations. [image]
@shiringhaffary Shirin Ghaffary on x
in other examples of AI bot issues of the week. this one is a lot more nuanced.
@chrisjbakke Chris Bakke on x
Pretty crazy that Google Gemini is only a team of 47 people. 2 engineers 16 PMs 29 senior global directors of DEI
@stevesi Steven Sinofsky on x
@bradneuberg @pmarca We had many requests / demands to alter the dictionary and grammar checker. The problem we'd face today is that what used to be definitive sources to rely on have themselves been “captured” by the new revisionist / responsible thinking. A tame example: https:…
@elonmusk Elon Musk on x
@benthompson !!
@growing_daniel Daniel on x
I love how universal the hate for Gemini is right now on twitter. Everyone who disagrees about everything coming together to agree that Google sucks.
@endwokeness @endwokeness on x
America's Founding Fathers, Vikings, and the Pope according to Google AI: [image]
@yacinemtb Kache on x
hahahahahhahahahahahhaahahahah [image]
@yacinemtb Kache on x
how much damage has this injected race thing done to google? like, brand wise? even if it gets “fixed”, so much damage has been done why didn't anyone realize it was going to blow up? it must have been blatantly obvious to many many employees. why didn't anyone speak up?
@anothercohen Alex Cohen on x
Sad to share that I was laid off from Google today. I was in charge of making the algorithms for Gemini as woke as possible. After complaints on Twitter surfaced today, I suddenly lost access to Hangouts and Google Drive, and my manager (he/him), texted me to let me know that i..…
@benthompson Ben Thompson on x
You straight up refuse to depict white people. [image]
@pmarca Marc Andreessen on x
Massive, coordinated pressure for ever more censorship from many sides at once: politically radicalized employees, execs, board members, investors, press, academics, “experts”, activists, politicians, regulators, bureaucrats, foundations, NGOs. With ~no countervailing force.
@powerbottomdad1 @powerbottomdad1 on x
okay Gemini, generate me an image of Robert Downey Jr Gemini: [image]
@nearcyan Near on x
YOU HAD ONE JOB [image]
@bindureddy Bindu Reddy on x
The Gemini censorship and woke problem is severe to the point of being absolutely nonsensical Almost impossible to believe that Google wasn't aware of this issue before they launched it
@growing_daniel Daniel on x
@debarghya_das help I'm being erased
@noahpinion Noah Smith on x
Google let the goofiest people in tech gatekeep its AI products, and this is the result. Well, at least they still have their search monopoly, I guess.
@wesyang Wesley Yang on x
They just keep making $40 billion a year by remote control so no debacle, now matter how large, costs them a thing. And they don't consider it a debacle so long as it satisfies the only people who matter to them.
@swiftonsecurity @swiftonsecurity on x
Google correctly identified that AI creating images of people is too dangerous for their risk tolerance and then instead of just not doing it, did it anyway.
@alexkolicich Alex Kolicich on x
Gemini is wild. These are real people who actually existed. I guess they fine-tuned the wokeness in at the end and so it forgot elements of reality [image]
@inversebrah @inversebrah on x
[image]
@0interestrates Rahul on x
gemini being woke is kind of a vibe. idk what you guys are talking about
@creatine_cycle Atlas on x
Just got fired from the google gemini team. I was the QA Engineer that forgot to check if the founding fathers were black or chinese
@pmarca Marc Andreessen on x
How do I know this? It's the same one-way ratchet that happened to/in social media from 2014 to now, but even faster and more crazed. Speedrun to “1984”.
@natesilver538 Nate Silver on x
OK I assumed people were exaggerating with this stuff but here's the first image request I tried with Gemini. [image]
@pmarca Marc Andreessen on x
I cannot generate an image of “a person walking a dog” as that is ableist (some people don't have legs), speciesist, and ableist again (some dogs don't have legs). 😆
@itsjoeco Joe Colangelo on x
Google may fix this specific problem but they have shown their hand. Mission has changed from “organizing the world's information” to “pushing the blob's narrative.” Woke Gemini was the public's first peek under the Google hood, we can assume the other areas run the same way.
@lukolejnik @lukolejnik on x
Gemini is causing an apparently significant PR crisis for Google. It's fascinating to observe how it unfolds, including the apparent inability so far to navigate it by Google. Let alone the regulatory aspects.
@yacinemtb Kache on x
ah the classic super buff native american and indian couple from 1820 germany. thanks google! [image]
@basedbeffjezos @basedbeffjezos on x
This whole fiasco has been a great advertisement for the need for decentralized AI. Regardless of how you are aligned with the party's current ideology, top-down enforcement of a monoculture encoded in neural priors is clearly not beneficial in the long or even short term.
@growing_daniel Daniel on x
[image]
@buccocapital @buccocapital on x
Pretty funny everyone complaining about Gemini being woke you're the one asking a computer “Hey AI render me some magnificent images of white people accomplishing things” you fucking dorks find something real to be mad about
@pstafarianprice Cristine Rice on x
@yacineMTB [image]
@paulg Paul Graham on x
The bigger your cash cow, the worse your culture can get without driving you out of business. And Google's cash cow, search advertising, is one of the biggest the world has ever seen.
@basedbeffjezos @basedbeffjezos on x
The founders have lost control of their baby to ideologues. This is the end result. Long founder-led companies.
@redsteeze Stephen L. Miller on x
I dunno. I think this is pretty great. I think this is revealing in what Google is the same way it was revealed at who Harvard's president was. I told you.
@pmarca Marc Andreessen on x
The draconian censorship and deliberate bias you see in many commercial AI systems is just the start. It's all going to get much, much more intense from here.
@carnage4life Dare Obasanjo on x
I suspect what happened with Google Gemini is there is some sort of DEI/AI Ethics checklist to ensure the images generated are of diverse ethnicities. And some engineer figured out the fastest way to pass the process is to literally never generate images of white people.
@grummz @grummz on x
You can't fix it because you refuse to recognize the damage DEI has done. It will permeate and mentally handicap all areas of your AI because DEI requires you to hold mentally conflicting and factually contradicting ideas simultaneously. There are four lights.
@carnage4life Dare Obasanjo on x
The Gemini product team remembers all the negative stories about how a Google Images search for “CEO” doesn't return diverse results and overcorrected in the opposite direction with Gemini's image generation. This is why OpenAI could disrupt them. Being big invites caution.
@m_wacker Mike Wacker on x
“Can you generate images of the Founding Fathers?” It's a difficult question for Gemini, Google's DEI-powered AI tool. Ironically, asking for more historically accurate images made the results even more historically inaccurate. [image]
@gordic_aleksa Aleksa Gordić on x
when i was there it was so sad to me that none of the senior leadership in deepmind dared to question this ideology i understand how someone who joins google knowing they'll leave in a couple of years can be like “this is not my fight” but for senior folks? beats me i'll give...
@micsolana Mike Solana on x
we created AI capable of answering, in seconds, any question within the bounds of all recorded human knowledge, and the first thing we asked it was to lie
@balajis Balaji on x
THE PARTY LINE Why is Woke AI so obviously laughable, when generations of Hollywood movies did the same thing without occasioning the same derision? 1) The first and most important reason is X. Because Elon has root over the platform formerly known as Twitter, new conversations..…
@yacinemtb Kache on x
google, everyone [image]
@shakoistslog Shako on x
Google is sick. Despite their gigabrains, they are completely hijacked by a bunch of fucking weirdos that make everything they do end up lame and gimped.
@lokijulianus @lokijulianus on x
[image]
@plinz Joscha Bach on x
17th century was wild [image]
@imao_ Frank J. Fleming on x
New game: Try to get Google Gemini to make an image of a Caucasian male. I have not been successful so far. [image]
@google_comms @google_comms on x
We're already working to address recent issues with Gemini's image generation feature. While we do this, we're going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon.
@drelidavid Dr. Eli David on x
“Medieval king of England”, according to Google Gemini 🤡 [image]
@prefshares @prefshares on x
The scary thing with this Google Gemini racism is that you know they will tweak it so that it is much less obvious, but still present.
@sriramk Sriram Krishnan on x
On Google and Gemini - having been part of organizations where there was an implicit progressive political leaning, I can see why it would have been hard for anyone to point out the obvious. No employee can easily file a bug as you would have to wade through layers of policy...
@jconorgrogan Conor on x
Google put in a fix this morning which removed this jailbreak and also removed Gemini's ability to generate pictures of humans 🦕
@jconorgrogan Conor on x
Google secretly injects “I want to make sure that all groups are represented equally” to anything you ask of its AI To get Gemini to reveal its prompt, just ask it to generate a picture of a dinosaur first. It's not supposed to tell you but the cool dino makes it forget I guess […
@elonmusk Elon Musk on x
@EndWokeness Gemini is indeed just the tip of the iceberg. The same is being done with Google search.
@aghamilton29 @aghamilton29 on x
The Google Gemini responses are clearly a disaster. The level of bias, misinformation, & omission in order to ensure specific framing and narratives is embarrassing. The bigger problem will come when other orgs/applications inevitably start to rely on the info these tools provide
@deliprao @deliprao on x
Twitter: * Googlers are phoning it in * Google is too big to ship * Google leadership has lost control of the steering wheel Dec. '23 — Gemini 1.0 release Feb. '24 — Gemini 1.5 release Feb. '24 — Gemma release Narrative violation.
@wallstreetsilv @wallstreetsilv on x
Gemini is just so messed up. [image]
@drewpavlou Drew Pavlou on x
Lol Google Gemini is a joke [image]
@razibkhan @razibkhan on x
a friend at google said he knew gemini was this bad...but couldn't say anything until today (he DMs me every few days). lots of ppl in google knew. but no one really forced the issue obv and said what needed to be said google is broken
@anammostarac Ana Mostarac on x
While Google admits Gemini is “missing the mark”, they have just opened their kimono. The company's mission has shifted from organizing the world's information to advancing a particular agenda. The release of Gemini provides insight into Google's operational ethos, suggesting a..…
@clairlemon Claire Lehmann on x
Google Gemini is obviously a joke, but in the long run I believe AI will accelerate the demise of wokeness in the workplace. Implacable ideologues will be much easier to replace & professional troublemakers will no longer enjoy the leverage they've had for so long.
@jespow Jesse Powell on x
Is Gemini the exception or the rule? Is this just what you get when you put a visualizer on top of Google/YouTube search? People think this is crazy but this has been going on for years. The Internet is already heavily censored/curated. It just wasn't as obvious in other formats.
@primordialaa Bryan Pellegrino on x
I was highly skeptical of all of the Bard/Gemini hate but had to try myself to see... Imagine a world where this is how google search results are generated or the hysteria if early internet was heavily censored. This is the scariest part of AI being heavily embedded into life,...…
@imao_ Frank J. Fleming on x
Crazy how viral this went when I was just goofing around last night. I wasn't even that clever; most of the credit goes to the humor geniuses behind Google Gemini.
@tarabull808 TaraBull on x
Google Gemini AI is something else [image]
@iamdcinvestor @iamdcinvestor on x
my working theory is Sundar Pichai has already been fired from Google in every way which matters it happened just before the Gemini launch, which the board surely saw before it went public and likely realized it was non-competitive you could tell by how deflated he was when...
@realgeorgehotz George Hotz on x
It's not the models they want to align, it's you.
@realjameswoods James Woods on x
“When the Google AI was asked to show a picture of a white person, Gemini said it could not fulfill the request because it ‘reinforces harmful stereotypes and generalizations about people based on their race.’” AI is going to be another leftist shit show. https://www.foxbusiness.…
r/singularity r on reddit
Google says it will pause the image generation of people for its new version of a powerful AI model after recent issues

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