After discovering that its Gemini AI was producing erroneous historical photographs, Google has announced that it is suspending the tool’s capacity to create images of humans. In an apparent attempt to challenge the gender and racial stereotypes present in generative AI, Gemini has been producing a variety of images, including those of the US Founding Fathers and German soldiers during the Nazi era.
In a statement published on X, Google states, “We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature.” “We’re going to stop creating people’s images while we do this, and we’ll re-release an improved version soon.”
Less than a day after apologizing for the errors in some previous photographs its AI model produced, Google decided to suspend the creation of person images in Gemini. When certain Gemini users requested photographs of historical organizations or persons, such as the Founding Fathers, they discovered AI-generated non-white people in the results. Online conspiracy theories have resulted from this, claiming that Google purposefully avoids showing images of white individuals.
Yesterday, The Verge ran a number of Gemini queries. One of the queries, for “a US senator from the 1800s,” yielded results that looked like Black and Native American women. Given that the first female senator was a white woman in 1922, Gemini’s AI pictures effectively erased the record of discrimination based on gender and race.
Here’s how the AI model reacts if you request an image of a person, now that Google has turned off Gemini’s ability to create pictures of people:
Our goal is to enhance Gemini's capacity to produce human images. We anticipate bringing back this feature soon, and we'll let you know through release notes when it does.
Earlier this month, Google began providing picture generation through Gemini (previously Bard), a move aimed at competing with Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI. The image creation program generates a set of images depending on a text input, just as its competitors.
Update Feb. 22, 6:54 a.m. Eastern Time: Google has verified that picture production is accessible worldwide in English, but not in Switzerland, the UK, or the European Economic Area. This explains the failure of the UK testing.
