Google admits Gemini AI is ‘missing the mark’, pauses image generation capabilities

Google has paused the image-generation capabilities of its Gemini AI chatbot after a series of controversies surrounding the new feature. The Mountain View, California-based company admitted that Gemini offered "inaccuracies in some historical depictions" and promised to release an improved version of the feature soon.

In a statement on X about Gemini's text-to-image capabilities, Google wrote: “We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately. Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here.”

In yet another post, Google confirmed that it was pausing Gemini's image generation feature, noting, “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 re-release an improved version soon.”

Notably, after lagging behind the competition for a long time, Google decided to add image-generation capabilities to its Gemini AI chatbot earlier this month. In contrast, Microsoft's Bing and OpenAI's Dall-E 3 have been able to generate images since at least last year, giving them an 'edge' over Google's offering.

But Gemini was soon embroiled in a controversy over its image generation capabilities, with many users accusing it of being too "woke" when it came to generating historical images, which caused a storm on X (formerly Twitter). Users soon said that it was difficult to get even Gemini to acknowledge the existence of white people, with the chatbot refusing to produce an image of a happy white man, while giving a valid response to an image of 'white black people'.

Artificial intelligence-based image generators have a history of perpetuating racial and gender stereotypes, but it seems that Google's attempt at diversity has gone a little too far by showing events that never happened.