CEO Sundar Pichai addresses staff following controversial Google Gemini AI images incident

Shortly after the public became aware of Google Gemini’s errors in creating AI images, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai expressed his disappointment in the results and acknowledged that their AI chatbot also made significant mistakes. The problem arose when users on X platform noticed Gemini’s inaccurate portrayal of people of color and its refusal to generate images of white individuals.

The Gemini Image Generation Controversy

Gemini’s troubles began last week when more and more cases emerged of the AI chatbot creating inaccurate representations of people. In another problematic case, it compared Elon Musk’s influence to Adolf Hitler, sparking controversy. According to a Semaphore report, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai spoke to the team behind the AI chatbot, Google DeepMind, acknowledging Gemini’s mistakes and stating that such problems are unacceptable.

“I know some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias. To be clear, this is completely unacceptable and we did it wrong,” Pichai said. He also confirmed that the team behind it is working around the clock to fix the issues, claiming that they’re seeing a “significant improvement in many prompts.”

Read all about Sundar Pichai’s heated discussion with the staff below:

“I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses on the Gemini app (formerly Bard). I know some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias. To be clear, this is completely unacceptable and we did it wrong. .

Our teams have been working around the clock to resolve these issues. We are already seeing significant improvements in many prompts. No artificial intelligence is perfect, especially at this stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we’ll stay there for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.

Our mission to organize the world’s knowledge and make it universally available and useful is sacred. We have always strived to provide users with useful, accurate and unbiased information on our products. That’s why people trust them. This must be our approach across all of our products, including our emerging AI products.

We plan to implement clear measures, including structural changes, updated product guidance, improved release processes, effective reviews and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We’ll figure all this out and make the necessary changes.

While we learn from what went wrong, we should also take advantage of the product and technical announcements we’ve made in AI over the past few weeks. This includes some fundamental advances in our underlying models, such as our million long context window breakthroughs and our open models, both of which have been well received.

We know what it takes to create great products that billions of people and businesses use and love, and with our infrastructure and research expertise, we have an incredible springboard for the AI wave. Let’s focus on what matters most: building useful products that earn the trust of our users.”