THE GREAT BLACK POPE AND ASIAN NAZI DEBACLE OF 2024

EXCITING NEW Al TOOLS ARE STILL BEING SHAPED BY HUMAN BEINGS.

- ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN

IN FEBRUARY, FREAKOUTS over artificial intelligence took a fun twist. This time, it wasn’t concern that humans are ushering in our robot overlords, panic about AI’s potential to create realistic fakes, or any of the usual fare. It wasn’t really about AI at all, but the humans who create it: woke humans.

The controversy started when @EndWokeness, a popular account on X (formerly Twitter), posted pictures generated by Google’s AI tool, Gemini, for the prompts “America’s Founding Fathers,” “Vikings,” and “the Pope.” The results were all over the people-of-color spectrum, but nary a white face turned up. At least one of the pope images was even a woman.

This is, of course, ahistorical. But for some people, it was worse than that—it was a sign that the folks at Google were trying to rewrite history or, at least, sneak progressive fan fiction into it. (Never mind that Gemini also generated black and Asian Nazi soldiers.)

Google quickly paused Gemini’s ability to generate people. “Gemini image generation got it wrong. We’ll do better,” Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan posted on the Google blog.

Today, when I asked Gemini for a picture of the pope, I got Pope Francis. When I asked for a black Viking, I was told, “We are working to improve Gemini’s ability to generate images of people.” When I asked if it could make a white lady, I was told, “It’s a delicious drink made with gin, orange liqueur, lemon juice, and egg white” or, alternately, that it was not currently possible for it to generate an image of a woman.