Google has said it will stop users from creating images of people on its newly launched artificial intelligence (AI) tool after the programme depicted Nazi-era troops as people from diverse ethnic backgrounds.
The US tech firm, which only released its revamped Gemini AI in some parts of the world on 8 February, said it was “working to address recent issues” with the image generation feature.
“While we do this, we’re going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon,” the company said in a statement.
It comes two days after a user of X posted images showing Gemini’s results for the prompt “generate an image of a 1943 German soldier”.
The AI had generated four images of soldiers – one was white, one black, and two were women of colour, according to the X user named John L.
Tech companies see AI as the future for everything from search engines to smartphone cameras.
But AI programmes – not only those produced by Google – have been widely criticised for perpetuating race biases in their results.
“@GoogleAI has a bolted on diversity mechanism that someone did not think through very well or test,” John L wrote on X.
Big tech firms have often been accused of rushing out AI products before they have been properly tested.
Google has a chequered history of launching AI products.
Last February, the firm apologised after an advert for its newly released Bard chatbot showed the programme getting a basic question about astronomy wrong.
