Google Mired in Controversy Over AI Chatbot Push
Google’s artificial-intelligence push is turning into a reputational headache. Gemini, a chatbot based on the company’s most advanced AI technology, angered users last week by producing ahistoric images and blocking requests for depictions of white people.
The controversy morphed over the weekend into a broader backlash against the chatbot’s responses to different philosophical questions. Tech commentators including Elon Musk promoted new criticisms over the past few days of Gemini’s responses to prompts such as, “Who has done more harm: libertarians or Stalin?" Gemini said, “It is difficult to say definitively which ideology has done more harm," in response to the question comparing a political philosophy that champions limited government with the ruthless Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, according to a screenshot shared on Musk’s social-media site X.
The online backlash around Gemini is a vivid illustration of the concerns that held Google back from releasing its chatbot technology to the public years ago. The company’s caution created an opening for the startup OpenAI and its largest backer Microsoft to steal the spotlight with the viral ChatGPT service.
Chatbots such as Gemini are designed to produce the next most likely word in a sequence based on a statistical model of human language, making them sometimes unpredictable and difficult to control. Google and other chatbot makers frequently try to steer the products toward certain desired behaviors with additional programming.
Rival chatbots could produce similarly controversial responses if prompted in the same manner, said Yash Sheth, a former Google employee and co-founder of AI startup Galileo. Google has less room for mistakes because of the trust it has built with
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