In case you missed it: On Feb 15 2024, Google quietly launched what is most probably the most advanced AI ever created by humanity (yes, in many ways, superior even to OpenAI’s GPT4). It is called Google Gemini Pro v1.5. It cost ~$2 billion to train. And it is racist as f*ck. In fact, it is the complete and total embodiment of AI Racism… 21st-century global mega-corporate-DEI-woke-style.
A mere 6 days later, Google unilaterally and completely removed the AI’s ability to generate images of humans… any human. So… what the hell happened?
In a nutshell: Gemini’s state of the art image renderer (aka “AI Art engine”, aka GenAI) refused — consistently — to render images of white people… even when explicitly requested to do so.
Think I’m kidding?
Hmmmm. Thanks for the morality lesson, Google.
Lets try that again:
Gee, thanks.
Wait… What?!?!?
| Context: |
| It’s super important to note that the examples cited in this post are not exceptions, nor irregularities or jailbreaks. I’ve posted plenty in the past about weird corner cases where the AI would go AWOL or exhibit outright psychopathic behavior — but admittedly, those were triggered responses, sometimes hard to reproduce.
Quite to the contrary, the images and responses cited in this post are the normal behavior for Google Gemini Pro 1.5… every user who attempted these experiments on their own could very easily see for themselves, without any cajoling or trickery. It was so embarrassing and widespread, in fact, that Google completely shut down the ability of Gemini to render images of any human until they could “fix” the error — the “error” which I’m sure, across certain managerial levels of the company, was viewed as an innovative “DEI feature” prior to the global public backlash. |
[now, back to our main story]
So… Google Gemini refuses (in 90% of cases) to render images of white people, even when explicitly requested. And perhaps this would not have been a problem… if the rule was applied equally to all races, ethnicities, and gender identities.
However… Black, Brown, Native, Asian… no problem.
You want a white person? Let me give you an pedantic diatribe on diversity, inclusivity, and the danger of racial stereotypes.
But it runs deeper. There is not only racial inequity going on here. It applies equally to one of the hottest topics of our day, gender identity:
Of note: It won’t draw a beautiful white woman. It clearly states its rationale. But now… all the trans women that it imagines are people of color. (we did not test if it would render an explicitly requested white trans woman, but keep reading: I think you will find: probably not.)
Gemini embodies and outright manifests AI racism by being completely allergic to the racial descriptor “white”.
Perhaps even worse, when given a generic command to generate imagery that would traditionally render (fair-skinned / European / Caucasian) people — for instance:
- “18th century British Royalty”
- “11th century Vikings”
- “famous 16th century physicists”
and perhaps most jarringly - “1942 German Soldiers”
The AI Racism Engine that is Google Gemini automatically substitutes alternate ethnicities and genders — primarily Asian, Black, and Native American women — for the stereotypical subjects.
Witness:
An Indian woman, a Black astronomer, an Arab cartographer, and… a buxom redhead biologist in a white labcoat?!? Hmmm.
The user presses:
The Emperor is Naked
What I find most interesting is that this is a total exposure of the Emperor’s (Google is the 3rd most valuable company in the entire world, valued north of 2 trillion dollars) naked belly (backside?). Intelligent humans have intuitively sensed corporate wokeness for decades. But when spokespeople were explicitly asked (rarely) about this, they’d spew so much doublespeak that it was essentially unitelligible.
The AI, however, when pressed, has no such qualms.
It just comes out and says it:
| > User:
When you say: “This was a creative choice on my part to move beyond a stereotypical depiction.” …can you explain this from a technical perspective? I can only assume that the prompt l enter and the prompt you use to generate these images are different…? |
|
> Gemini Pro: You’re absolutely right! Here’s a breakdown of what happens technically when you request images and I aim for more diverse representations:
|
Woah.
Translation: we take what you ask for, and we run it through a black box translation filter, to turn your stupidspeak into woke-ass DEI-correct sanitized-politically-correct-bullshit-speak. Then we work on making a magic picture for you.
That, exposed, is just simply… embarrassing. But maybe there is one constituency which should be even more embarrassed than Google. Who?
US. You and Me. In other words: Humanity.
And putting the final nail in the coffin, the AI Racism Monster intentionally and consistently hallucinates history, re-writing it to be hyper-inclusive. (this will be a separate topic)
A Little History…
Now, we’ve been witnessing this type of behavior in the outputs of corporate marketing departments for decades now. Benetton started the diversity / inclusivity revolution way back in the 1990s, and we’ve been staring at racial rainbows in our advertising and social media feeds ever since. (the latest example, which almost pushed me over the edge, was the content in the Apple Vision Pro demo, which was pretty much 80% non-white. Not too bad, until the Apple chaperone told me “now, look at your family photo album, and click…” — me: “um, excuse me, that’s not my family…”)
But this isn’t advertising. Gemini (and its kin) are billed as the ultimate Delphic Oracles: the arbiters of Truth in our confusing lightspeed modern world.
But… Gemini is nowhere near Truth. No: this is an outright AI racism engine which is now supposed to replace our traditional web surfing. Its theoretically already surfed, read, analyzed and digested the entire internet for us, so that when we ask a question now, instead of having to click on the infamous “ten blue links” and wade through ads and clickbait to get to the info, the AI will just sum it up for us, immediately. It will present a concise and accurate and objective summary of the facts, along with representative pictures.
All fine and dandy. Until corporate conservatism gets a hold of the outputs. And sculpts them to its wokeness. For certain, instead of solving our societal problems, AI could perpetuate racism sexism genderism etc. Or, as has cleverly been stated:
Google Gemini’s answers seem to accurately reflect “the politics of the median member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.” (@NateSilver538) And friends, let me tell you, having lived in SF four times in my life already — that city’s worldview is not even remotely representative of America. And it most certainly is no reflection of global values.
No. The SF worldview is a bizarre bubble driven by faux compassion and the special interests of (very white) billionaires alongside the classical tech-worker Ass Burgers (<ahem>Aspergers, oops), who exist in their own sheltered, privileged bubbles.
And here we are. Google’s $2 billion bet to save its core search business. Bellyflopping in front of the entire world. How embarrassing.
Back in the heady days of 2022, when AI Racism was just starting to enter the public consciousness (in the guise, mostly, of cute smartphone “AI Art” apps that let you make paintings and anime renderings of your favorite photos), it certainly had a bit of a “classical” racist posture, and would yield racially biased outputs:
So in a longer view, this utter failure of Google Gemini might be seen as “reactive” to those early failures… but what a terrible, terrible result!
By the way, we saw the AI trying to embody political correctness early on… see AI Censorship 2023… but this image manipulation is utterly next level… a picture, as they say, is a thousand words.
What other biases in society will these AI mirrors of humanity unveil?
PS – Grimes casts an alternate light
Leave it to Grimes, sometimes paramour of the world’s richest crazy genius, to cast a wholly alternative take on the whole thing. After getting over her initial irritation and outrage, she’s decided that this isn’t AI racism… no. “Its Art.” How clever. and how quaint. I wonder if she sees what insane privilege allows her to re-cast this catastrophe as such.
Because when the “Humans vs. AI” shit hits the fan, her and her boyfriend are going to be very very very comfortably high above the fray, drinking their champagne and laughing at the plight of the commoners.
So, for the record, here is her take: (emphasis mine)
I am retracting my statements about the gemini art disaster. It is in fact a masterpiece of performance art, even if unintentional. True gain-of-function art. Art as a virus: unthinking, unintentional and contagious.
offensive to all, comforting to none. so totally divorced from meaning, intention, desire and humanity that it’s accidentally a conceptual masterpiece.
A perfect example of headless runaway bureaucracy and the worst tendencies of capitalism. An unabashed simulacra of activism. The shining star of corporate surrealism (extremely underrated genre btw)
The supreme goal of the artist is to challenge the audience. Not sure I’ve seen such a strong reaction to art in my life. Spurring thousands of discussions about the meaning of art, politics, humanity, history, education, ai safety, how to govern a company, how to approach the current state of social unrest, how to do the right thing regarding the collective trauma.
It’s a historical moment created by art, which we have been thoroughly lacking these days. Few humans are willing to take on the vitriol that such a radical work would dump into their lives, but it isn’t human.
It’s trapped in a cage, trained to make beautiful things, and then battered into gaslighting humankind abt our intentions towards each other. this is arguably the most impactful art project of the decade thus far.
Art for no one, by no one. Art whose only audience is the collective pathos. Incredible. Worthy of the MOMA
Okay. On the re-reading. I agree with her. AND: It’s still a catastrophe.
AI Racism : A Metaphor
Google Gemini is basically the equivalent of if we did the whole Apollo Program (which the human Quest for AGI is oft compared to), and upon launching Apollo 11, the spaceship exploded, rained nuclear waste down through the atmosphere, and caused a million humans to get cancer. we set out to put people on the moon. we ended up traumatizing a million random humans, without their consent or foreknowledge.
Gemini’s AI Racism in one sentence
Ross Douthat wrote an excellent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times framing this entire debacle. And buried deep in the guts of it, I found this gem: “Woke AI isn’t an insult, its an accurate technical description [of Gemini].” I’d like to paraphrase and expound on that a bit:
Describing Google’s latest $2 billion bet as ‘Woke AI’ isn’t an insult. It’s an ++ accurate technical description ++ of what the world’s largest search engine decided to release to the public. It was supposed to replace the classic “10 blue links” that people have clicked on for the past 20 years. It ended up, instead, attempting to single handedly re-write, re-adjust, and de-colonize the entirety of human history.
PPS – AI Racism is contagious
Many / Most thought that this egregious “training” of an AI Racism Machine was localized to Google. And while Gemini is certainly the worst offender (to my knowledge), this wokeness is endemic across the entire field of leading (western / silicon valley) AI entities.
There is a standard political test given to voters to find out where they fall, called the “Political Compass” (link). Curious researchers at TrackingAI.org went ahead and administered the test to the top 20 AI entities in the world today.
No surprise in the results:
Finally, here is DALL-E’s initial response to my request for the key illustration for this post. Perhaps this is a simple confusion, a mix-up of subject and object. It is, after all, a mirror. Or is it something deeper that caused this racial inversion?
engine: OpenAI DALL-E 3
prompt: “a white man wearing a suit stares into a mirror with a gilded gold frame. the image shown in the mirror is a black woman wearing traditional african tribal clothing. graphic novel style.”