Brin’s “We definitely messed up.”, at an AI “hackathon” event on 2 March, followed a slew of social media posts showing Gemini’s image generation tool depicting a variety of historical figures – including popes, founding fathers of the US and, most excruciatingly, German second world war soldiers – as people of colour.
If you create an image generator that always returns clean cut white men whenever you ask it to produce a “doctor” or a “business man”, but only ever spits out black when when you ask for a picture of someone cleaning, your PR department is going to have a bad time.
And even worse, it actually reinforces that image within users.
Doing the opposite of that isn’t any better
And Gemini was perfectly happy to exclude blacks from prompts about eating fried chicken and watermelon.
Turns out you can’t fight every fire with more fire, more often than not it will burn everything down. You can’t solve something as complex as systemic racism with more systemic racism just against a different group.