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Days after Gemini was caught in a controversy for its problematic text and image responses, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has addressed the problem and acknowledged that the company “got it wrong”.
He said that what happened was “completely unacceptable” and that the company is working on a fix. “Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts,” Pichai wrote in a memo that was shared by Semafor.
Since last week, Google’s AI chatbot Gemini has been knee deep in controversy. It started with the chatbotmaking a mess of generating inaccurate historic images, like depicting the Pope as a woman, Vikings as Black people, followed by a viral query with Gemini where the LLM failed to definitely answerwhether Elon Musk posting memes or Adolf Hitler is worse.
“I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard). I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong,” Pichai said in his memo addressing the company employees.
However, Pichai also defended Gemini, saying “no AI is perfect”. “No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us, and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale,” an excerpt from the memo reads.
Pichai promised several actions will be taken to fix the issue, including making changes to how things are structured within the company, updating guidelines for products, making sure launches are better, testing things more thoroughly, and recommending changes to their technology. “We are looking across all of this and will make the necessary changes,” Pichai added.
“Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products,” said Pichai in the memo.
While Pichai is right that no AI is perfect, the issue here isn’t the inaccuracy per se, but that Google prematurely rolled out its LLM when there was still some fine-tuning needed. As Pichai also acknowledged, the company needs to more thoroughly test its products before releasing them to the public.
