Blistering AI woke-up call

In a scathing email to Google employees, CEO Sundar Pichai blasted the Gemini AI chatbot’s habit of generating “woke” versions of historical figures as “completely unacceptable.”

Pichai said Google’s AI teams are “working around the clock” to fix Gemini, which was disabled last week after the “absurdly woke” chatbot ignited a social media firestorm with bizarrely revisionist pictures such as black Vikings, female popes, and even “diverse” Nazi-era German soldiers.

“I know that some of its responses have offended

‘That’s completely unacceptable and we got ’ it wrong. — Google CEO Sundar Pichai

our users and shown bias — to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong,” Pichai said in the Tuesday memo obtained by Semafor.

The missive marked Pichai’s first public remarks on the p.r. nightmare that erased more than $70 billion in market value in a single day earlier this week and raised renewed concerns among critics who say Google’s employees are injecting their political bias into the technology.

Pichai added that Google is “already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts.”

“No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes,” Pichai said. “And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.”

Gemini’s “woke” image disaster further damaged public trust in Google’s AI tools at a pivotal point for the company.

Researchers at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms are trying to “loosen up” its AI large language model Llama 3 — expected in July — to give better responses to contentious questions posed by users, The Information reported.