GOOGLE SAYS ITS AI IMAGE-GENERATOR WOULD SOMETIMES 'OVERCOMPENSATE' FOR DIVERSITY

Google apologized for its faulty rollout of a new artificial intelligence image-generator, acknowledging that in some cases the tool would “overcompensate” in seeking a diverse range of people even when such a range didn’t make sense.

The partial explanation for why its images put people of color in historical settings where they wouldn’t normally be found came a day after Google said it was temporarily stopping its Gemini chatbot from generating any images with people in them. That was in response to a social media outcry from some users claiming the tool had an anti-white bias in the way it generated a racially diverse set of images in response to written prompts.

“It’s clear that this feature missed the mark,” said a blog post from Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president who runs Google’s search engine and other businesses. “Some of the images generated are inaccurate or even offensive. We’re grateful for users’ feedback and are sorry the feature didn’t work well.”

Raghavan didn’t mention specific examples but among those that drew attention on social media this week were images that depicted a Black woman as a U.S. founding father and showed Black and Asian people as Nazi-era German soldiers.

Google added the new image-generating feature to its Gemini chatbot, formerly known as Bard, about three weeks ago. It was built atop an earlier Google research experiment called Imagen 2.

Google has known for a while that such tools can be unwieldly. In a 2022 technical paper, the researchers who developed Imagen warned that generative AI tools can be used for harassment or spreading misinformation “and raise many concerns regarding social and cultural exclusion and bias.” Those considerations informed Google’s decision not to release “a public demo” of Imagen or its underlying code, the researchers added at the time.