After promising to fix Gemini's image generation feature and then pausing it altogether, Google has published a blog post offering an explanation for why its technology overcorrected for diversity. Prabhakar Raghavan, the company's Senior Vice President for Knowledge & Information, explained that Google's efforts to ensure that the chatbot would generate images showing a wide range of people "failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range." Further, its AI model grew to become "way more cautious" over time and refused to answer prompts that weren't inherently offensive. "These two things led the model to overcompensate in some cases, and be over-conservative in others, leading to images that were embarrassing and wrong," Raghavan wrote. Google made sure that Gemini's image generation couldn't create violent or sexually explicit images of real persons and that the photos it whips up would feature people of various ethnicities and with different characteristics.

Google is pausing its new Gemini AI tool after users blasted the image generator for being'too woke' by replacing white historical figures with people of color. Artificial intelligence programs learn from the information available to them, and researchers have warned that AI is prone to recreate the racism, sexism, and other biases of its creators and of society at large. In this case, Google may have overcorrected in its efforts to address discrimination, as some users fed it prompt after prompt in failed attempts to get the AI to make a picture of a white person. X user Frank J. Fleming posted multiple images of people of color that he said Gemini generated. Each time, he said he was attempting to get the AI to give him a picture of a white man, and each time.

Google has put a temporary block on its new artificial intelligence model producing images of people after it portrayed German second world war soldiers and Vikings as people of colour. The tech company said it would stop its Gemini model generating images of people after social media users posted examples of images generated by the tool that depicted some historical figures – including popes and the founding fathers of the US – in a variety of ethnicities and genders. "We're already working to address recent issues with Gemini's image generation feature. While we do this, we're going to pause the image generation of people and will rerelease an improved version soon," Google said in a statement. Google did not refer to specific images in its statement, but examples of Gemini image results were widely available on X, accompanied by commentary on AI's issues with accuracy and bias, with one former Google employee saying it was "hard to get Google Gemini to acknowledge that white people exist". Jack Krawczyk, a senior director on Google's Gemini team, had admitted on Wednesday that the model's image generator – which is not available in the UK and Europe – needed adjustment.