Brin’s “We definitely messed up.”, at an AI “hackathon” event on 2 March, followed a slew of social media posts showing Gemini’s image generation tool depicting a variety of historical figures – including popes, founding fathers of the US and, most excruciatingly, German second world war soldiers – as people of colour.
Corporations making AI tools available to the general public are under a ton of scrutiny right now and are kinda in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. At the other extreme, if they completely uncensored it, the big controversial story would be that pedophiles are generating images of child porn or some other equally heinous shit.
These are the inevitable growing pains of a new industry with a ton of hype and PR behind it.