(Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Google plans on relaunching the controversial AI image generation on its Gemini chatbot as soon as next month.
"We have taken the feature offline while we fix that. We are hoping to have that back online very shortly in the next...few weeks,” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said at Mobile World Congress, according to Reuters.
The company pulled the plug on the feature because Gemini was generating historically inaccurate images, which some users found to be offensive. For example, if prompted for images of America’s “Founding Fathers,” it could depict a black, Native American, or Asian person instead.
Google has since sourced the problem to Gemini's AI model “overcompensating” when it comes to promoting ethnic diversity in images.
“First, our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range. And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive,” Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan said in a blog post on Friday.
In response, Google temporarily blocked Gemini’s ability to generate images of people. Raghavan added that the company plans on conducting “extensive testing” before it fully restores access to the feature. But it looks like Google doesn’t want to put the technology on hiatus for long, despite complaints from critics including Elon Musk, who claim Gemini is racist.
"My guess is zero people [at Google] get fired and they just fix the obvious stuff, while leaving the overall manipulation in place," Musk tweeted on Monday. (Musk has a competing AI chatbot from his xAI startup, dubbed Grok.)
Ironically, the controversy may have sparked a surge of user traffic to Gemini, according to Similarweb, a company that tracks website visits. “For the latest week's worth of data (ending Saturday), Gemini got 14 million visits, up about 70% from where Bard was at the end of January,” a SimilarWeb spokesperson tells PCMag.
However, Gemini still ranks behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which received an estimated 44.8 million visits last week.