For people at the trend-setting tech festival here, the scandal that erupted after Google’s chatbot, Gemini, cranked out images of black and Asian nazi soldiers was seen as a warning about the power artificial intelligence (AI) can give tech titans.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai last month slammed as “completely unacceptable” errors by his company’s Gemini AI app, after gaffes such as the images of ethnically diverse Nazi troops forced it to temporarily stop users from creating pictures of people.
Social media users mocked and criticized Google for the historically inaccurate images, like those showing a female black US senator from the 1800s — when the first such senator was not elected until 1992.
Photo: AP
“We definitely messed up on the image generation,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin said at a AI “hackathon,” adding that the company should have tested Gemini more thoroughly.
People interviewed at the popular South by Southwest arts and tech festival in Austin said the Gemini stumble highlights the inordinate power a handful of companies have over the AI platforms that are poised to change the way people live and work.
“Essentially, it was too ‘woke,’” said Joshua Weaver, a lawyer and tech entrepreneur, meaning Google had gone overboard in its effort to project inclusion and diversity.
Google quickly corrected its errors, but the underlying problem remains, said Charlie Burgoyne, chief executive of the Valkyrie applied science lab in Texas.
He equated Google’s fix of Gemini to putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.
While Google long had the luxury of having time to refine its products, it is now scrambling in an AI race with Microsoft Corp, OpenAI, Anthropic and others, Weaver said. “They are moving faster than they know how to move.”
Mistakes made in an effort at cultural sensitivity are flashpoints, particularly given the tense political divisions in the US, a situation exacerbated by Elon Musk’s X platform, the former Twitter.
“People on Twitter are very gleeful to celebrate any embarrassing thing that happens in tech,” Weaver said, adding that reaction to the Nazi gaffe was “overblown.”
However, the mishap called into question the degree of control those using AI tools have over information, Weaver said.
In the coming decade, the amount of information — or misinformation — created by AI could dwarf that generated by people, meaning those controlling AI safeguards would have huge influence on the world, he said.
Karen Palmer, an award-winning mixed-reality creator with Interactive Films Ltd, said she could imagine a future in which someone gets into a robo-taxi and, “if the AI scans you and thinks that there are any outstanding violations against you ... you’ll be taken into the local police station,” not your intended destination.
AI is trained on mountains of data and can be put to work on a growing range of tasks, from image or audio generation to determining who gets a loan or whether a medical scan detects cancer.
However, that data comes from a world rife with cultural bias, disinformation and social inequity — not to mention online content that can include casual chats between friends or intentionally exaggerated and provocative posts — and AI models can echo those flaws. With Gemini, Google engineers tried to rebalance the algorithms to provide results better reflecting human diversity.
The effort backfired.
“It can really be tricky, nuanced and subtle to figure out where bias is and how it’s included,” said technology lawyer Alex Shahrestani, a managing partner at Promise Legal law firm for tech companies.
Even well-intentioned engineers involved with training AI cannot help but bring their own life experience and subconscious bias to the process, he said.
Burgoyne also castigated big tech for keeping the inner workings of generative AI hidden in “black boxes,” so users are unable to detect any hidden biases.
“The capabilities of the outputs have far exceeded our understanding of the methodology,” he said.
Experts and activists are calling for more diversity in teams creating AI and related tools, and greater transparency as to how they work — particularly when algorithms rewrite users’ requests to “improve” results.
A challenge is how to appropriately build in perspectives of the world’s many and diverse communities, the Indigenous Futures Resource Center codirector Jason Lewis said.
At Indigenous AI, Jason works with far-flung indigenous communities to design algorithms that use their data ethically while reflecting their perspectives on the world, something he does not always see in the “arrogance” of big tech leaders.
He said his own work stands in “such a contrast from Silicon Valley rhetoric, where there’s a top-down ‘Oh, we’re doing this because we’re going to benefit all humanity’ bullshit, right?”
His audience laughed.
MULTIFACETED: A task force has analyzed possible scenarios and created responses to assist domestic industries in dealing with US tariffs, the economics minister said The Executive Yuan is tomorrow to announce countermeasures to US President Donald Trump’s planned reciprocal tariffs, although the details of the plan would not be made public until Monday next week, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. The Cabinet established an economic and trade task force in November last year to deal with US trade and tariff related issues, Kuo told reporters outside the legislature in Taipei. The task force has been analyzing and evaluating all kinds of scenarios to identify suitable responses and determine how best to assist domestic industries in managing the effects of Trump’s tariffs, he
TIGHT-LIPPED: UMC said it had no merger plans at the moment, after Nikkei Asia reported that the firm and GlobalFoundries were considering restarting merger talks United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), the world’s No. 4 contract chipmaker, yesterday launched a new US$5 billion 12-inch chip factory in Singapore as part of its latest effort to diversify its manufacturing footprint amid growing geopolitical risks. The new factory, adjacent to UMC’s existing Singapore fab in the Pasir Res Wafer Fab Park, is scheduled to enter volume production next year, utilizing mature 22-nanometer and 28-nanometer process technologies, UMC said in a statement. The company plans to invest US$5 billion during the first phase of the new fab, which would have an installed capacity of 30,000 12-inch wafers per month, it said. The
Taiwan’s official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) last month rose 0.2 percentage points to 54.2, in a second consecutive month of expansion, thanks to front-loading demand intended to avoid potential US tariff hikes, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. While short-term demand appeared robust, uncertainties rose due to US President Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade policy, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s economy this year would be characterized by high-level fluctuations and the volatility would be wilder than most expect, Lien said Demand for electronics, particularly semiconductors, continues to benefit from US technology giants’ effort
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his