Google ‘messed up’ over black Nazi images

GOOGLE’S co-founder Sergey Brin has admitted that the company “messed up” after its AI chatbot created images of black Nazis.

Speaking at an “hackathon” event on Saturday in Silicon Valley, Mr Brin said the system was not thoroughly tested before being released to the public.

It comes after the company suffered ridicule when its Gemini program inserted ethnic minority groups when asked to create images of people from history who were white.

As well as black Nazis and Native American Vikings, it also portrayed the

US founding fathers as a diverse group. At a meeting of the AGI House, a Silicon Valley AI group, Mr Brin said: “We definitely messed up on the image generation. I think it was mostly due to just not thorough testing and it definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people.”

Google has now suspended Gemini’s ability to generate images. It was also criticised for answers given by its chatbot, which included failing to condemn paedophilia and refusing to write arguments in favour of oil and gas.

In a video of Saturday’s meeting posted on social media, Mr Brin said the company did not understand why the chatbot “leans left in many cases” but said Google had addressed many of the issues in recent days.

He said: “We haven’t fully understood why it leans left in many cases and that’s not our intention. If you try it over this last week it should be 80pc better of the test cases that we’ve covered.”

Mr Brin, who co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998, no longer has a formal role at the company but sits on the board and along with Mr Page has ultimate control of the company.

He has largely withdrawn from public life. His thoughts on the company’s progress came amid pressure on Sundar Pichai, the Google chief executive, over the chatbot debacle.