Is Google’s Gemini chatbot woke by accident, or by design?
The tech giant’s new artificial-intelligence model invents black Vikings and Asian popes
IT ALL STARTED with black Vikings and Asian Nazis. Users of Google Gemini, the tech giant’s artificial-intelligence model, recently noticed that asking it to create images of Vikings, German soldiers from 1943 or America’s Founding Fathers produced surprising results: hardly any of the people depicted were white. Gemini had been programmed to show a range of ethnicities. Other image-generation tools have been criticised because they tend to show white men when asked for images of entrepreneurs or doctors. Google wanted Gemini to avoid this trap; instead, it fell into another one, depicting George Washington as black and the pope as an Asian woman.
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This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Answers that raise questions”
United States March 2nd 2024
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From the March 2nd 2024 edition
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