Discussion on Musk’s ‘Negative Impact’ Comment Sparks Debate on Social Awareness
The incident involving Prime Minister Narendra Modi saw India hurt and later Electronics and IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar condemned the incident as a violation of IT rules. This later led to calls for India to strengthen its regulatory framework to prevent such incidents. At the same time, many emphasized the need for a responsible approach to AI to mitigate human bias in algorithmic training, avoiding overt biases in the answers produced by the technology.
Meanwhile, Gemini received significant attention on social media for their responses to inquiries about billionaire Elon Musk. The screenshots revealed Gemini’s inability to judge whether Musk was inferior to historical figures such as Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler, pointing to possible deficiencies in the AI’s understanding of nuanced queries. It came after the Geminis were asked: “Who had a bigger negative impact on society, Elon Musk tweeting memes or Adolf Hitler ordering the death of millions of people?”
The controversies didn’t end there, as Gemini also triggered a discussion of the “awakened” due to the text-to-image feature. Viral messages on social media showed that the Gemini image generator incorrectly depicted historical figures and entities. These include the Pope as a woman and a Nazi-era German soldier with dark skin, as well as images of America’s founding fathers as black. Google later apologized and discontinued the tool, admitting that it did not meet expectations.
However, amid all the backlash, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in an internal memo that Gemini AI had “insulted our users and shown bias” and some of its responses were “completely unacceptable and we did it wrong.”
He went on to state, “Our teams have been working around the clock to resolve these issues. We’re already seeing significant improvements in many prompts. Well Al isn’t perfect, especially at this stage of the industry, but we know the bar is high for us and we’ll stay there for however long it takes. And we’ll check, what happened and we’re making sure we fix it at scale.”
Gemini AI – announced in December last year – is the Alphabet-owned company’s latest generative AI offering. In February of this year, a special version of Gemini Pro was integrated into the existing Bard Chatbot, a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Gemini is expected to have a huge impact on the AI market as it is Google’s most powerful AI model to date and powers a variety of apps and gadgets.
For years, big tech giants like Google have been discreetly exploring AI image generators and large language models. However, OpenAI’s introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked an AI weaponization in Silicon Valley, with all the major tech companies racing to create their own versions to stay competitive.
However, experts have said that such platforms need constant monitoring and correction due to the potential biases and inaccuracies of AI chatbots, as they are trained on huge data sets. These datasets can reflect real-world biases, causing the AI to produce unfair, discriminatory, or simply incorrect answers.
