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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Dan Milmo and Alex Hern

‘We definitely messed up’: why did Google AI tool make offensive historical images?

Google’s Gemini AI illustrations of a 1943 German soldier.
Google’s Gemini AI illustrations of a 1943 German soldier. Photograph: Gemini AI/Google

Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin has kept a low profile since quietly returning to work at the company. But the troubled launch of Google’s artificial intelligence model Gemini resulted in a rare public utterance recently: “We definitely messed up.”

Brin’s comments, at an AI “hackathon” event on 2 March, follow a slew of social media posts showing Gemini’s image generation tool depicting a variety of historical figures – including popes, founding fathers of the US and, most excruciatingly, German second world war soldiers – as people of colour.

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