News on Medial

The AI Culture Wars Are Just Getting Started

Wired · 9m

Google faced criticism when its AI model, Gemini, defaulted to depicting women and people of color in images of historical figures that were predominantly white and male. While the company publicly apologized for the bias, conservative voices on social media have claimed that Gemini also showed a liberal bias in its text responses. Some within Google believe that the incident highlights the evolving norms surrounding AI models and their output. Google has previously made efforts to increase diversity in its algorithms' output, but the Gemini incident suggests that quality control may have been rushed. The incident raises questions about the future controversy and importance of tuning AI models. Efforts to fix bias in AI systems have been regarded as surface-level solutions, and the Gemini incident has been politicized on social media. AI ethics researchers suggest that the industry's pursuit of superhuman models able to please everyone sets the stage for cultural disputes.