Vivek Ramaswamy slams Google Gemini: Globally embarrassing rollout, blatantly racist

Indian-American politician Vivek Ramaswamy, on Friday, called Google's latest AI roll-out 'Gemini' a "global embarrassment" as the chatbot's text-to-image generation feature was marred in controversies over “inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions."

The 38-year-old went on to call the Google AI chatbot "blatantly racist" and blamed the company to "program their employees with broken incentives."

Taking to the social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), Vivek Ramaswamy said, "The globally embarrassing rollout of Google’s LLM has proves that James Damore was 100% correct about Google’s descent into an ideological echo chamber. Employees working on Gemini surely realized it was a mistake to make it so blatantly racist, but they likely kept their mouths shut because they didn’t want to get fired like Damore."

"These companies program their employees with broken incentives, and those employees then program the AI with the same biases," he added.

Earlier, Tesla and xAI CEO, Elon Musk, also criticised the AI chatbot. “I’m glad that Google overplayed their hand with their AI image generation, as it made their insane racist, anti-civilizational programming clear to all," he wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

Google's take on Gemini

Earlier today, Google paused image generation capabilities for the Gemini AI chatbot, admitted its inaccuracies and promised to re-release an improved version of the feature soon.

“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," the Mountain View California-based company said in a statement on X.

In another post, Google confirmed that it was pausing Gemini's image generation feature, saying that they are working to address the issue. “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," Google added.

What is the controversy?

It is not new for artificial intelligence-based image generators to have perpetuating racial and gender-based stereotypes but for Google, its attempt to bring diversity into the matter went a little too far.

Google's AI chatbot got caught up in a controversy over its image-generation feature almost immediately after its launch. Social media platform X flared up with posts calling Gemini "too woke" when generating historical images. It only worsened with time and users complained that the AI chatbot does not acknowledge the existence of white people.

It was hard to get even Gemini to acknowledge the existence of white people with the chatbot refusing to give an image of a happy white man while giving a valid response for an image of “white black people", said several users.