Sundar Pichai addresses Gemini controversy, says 'we got it wrong'

On Tuesday evening, Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the Gemini controversy within the company, denouncing the AI app's problematic responses regarding race as unacceptable. Pichai pledged to implement structural changes to rectify the issue.

Last week, Google halted the operation of its Gemini image creation tool following the generation of offensive results. The tool notably refrained from depicting white individuals in some instances, instead inserting images of women or people of colour when prompted to create representations of Vikings, Nazis, and the Pope.

The situation escalated when Gemini began generating questionable text responses, including a statement suggesting ambiguity between the societal impact of Elon Musk's memes and Hitler's actions, drawing significant criticism, particularly from conservatives who accused Google of harbouring anti-white bias.

Pichai acknowledged, "I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong."

He emphasised that Google has already taken steps to improve the oversight of Gemini, stating, "Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts."

Google confirmed the memo, and the full note from Pichai, sourced from global media, is below.

“Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts. No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.

Our mission to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.

We’ll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We are looking across all of this and will make the necessary changes.

Even as we learn from what went wrong here, we should also build on the product and technical announcements we’ve made in AI over the last several weeks. That includes some foundational advances in our underlying models e.g. our 1 million long-context window breakthrough and our open models, both of which have been well received.”

We know what it takes to create great products that are used and beloved by billions of people and businesses, and with our infrastructure and research expertise we have an incredible springboard for the AI wave. Let’s focus on what matters most: building helpful products that are deserving of our users’ trust.

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