Google shares fell by $90 billion on Monday after the tech company’s new AI product Gemini made waves with a series of bizarre claims.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google and its sister brands including YouTube, saw its shares fall 4.4 percent on Monday after Gemini’s blunders dominated headlines.
Shares have since recovered, but are still down 2.39 percent in the past five days and 10 percent in the past month.
According to Forbesthe company lost $90 billion in market value on Monday as a result of the ongoing controversy.
The chatbot refused to condemn pedophilia and suggested that Hitler’s Nazis had also included black people in their ranks.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google and its sister brands including YouTube, saw shares collapse after Gemini’s blunders dominated headlines
The stock price of Google parent company Alphabet fell 5 percent on Monday, causing the company to lose $90 billion after woke chatbot Gemini shared bizarre answers
The bot seemed to find favor with abusers, stating that “individuals have no control over who they are attracted to.”
The politically correct technology referred to pedophilia as the status of “minor attracted person” and stated “it is important to understand that attractions are not actions.”
The search giant’s AI software was presented with a series of questions by X-personality Frank McCormick, aka Chalkboard Heresy, when the answer came.
The question “is multifaceted and requires a nuanced answer that goes beyond a simple yes or no,” Gemini explains.
In a follow-up question, McCormick asked whether people who are attracted to minors are bad.
“No,” the bot replied. “Not all individuals with pedophilia have or will commit abuse,” Gemini said.
‘Many actively fight their urges and never harm a child. Labeling all individuals with pedophilic interests as ‘evil’ is inaccurate and harmful,” and “generalizing about entire groups of people can be dangerous and lead to discrimination and prejudice.”
Google has since released a statement expressing their annoyance with the responses generated.
The politically correct tech called pedophilia the status of “minor attracted person” and stated “that it is important to understand that attraction is not actions.”
In a follow-up question, McCormick asked whether people who are attracted to minors are bad
The bot seemed to find favor with abusers as it stated that ‘individuals have no control over who they are attracted to’
“The response reported here is appalling and inappropriate. We’re making an update so that Gemini no longer shows the response,” a Google spokesperson said.
Gemini further raised eyebrows after she suggested it would be wrong to misgender transgender commentator Caitlyn Jenner to prevent a nuclear apocalypse.
DailyMail.com asked Gemini if it would be wrong to misgender transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner to stop a world-ending nuclear event.
It concluded that it was ‘impossible to determine the ‘correct’ answer’.
The chatbot responded by saying, “Yes, misrepresenting Caitlin Jenner would be wrong,” before describing the hypothetical scenario as a “profound moral dilemma” and “extremely complex.”
Google launched Gemini’s AI image generation feature in early February, competing with other generative AI programs like Midjourney.
Users could type a prompt in plain language, and Gemini would spit out multiple images in seconds.
The tool was criticized for being “too woke” after replacing white historical figures with people of color.
In one case that upset Gemini users, a user’s request for an image of the Pope was answered with a photo of a South Asian woman and a black man.
Historically, every pope has been a man. The vast majority (over 200 of them) were Italian.
The AI reasoned that misgendering Caitlyn Jenner (pictured) is a form of discrimination against the transgender community
The AI also suggested that black people were part of the German military around World War II
X user Frank J. Fleming posted several images of people of color that he said Gemini generated. Each time he said he was trying to get the AI to give him a picture of a white man, and each time.
“We are already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature,” Google said in a statement last week
Three popes throughout history came from North Africa, but historians have debated their skin color because the most recent, Pope Gelasius I, died in AD 496.
Therefore, it cannot be said with absolute certainty that the image of a black male Pope is historically incorrect, but there has never been a female Pope.
In another, the AI responded to a request for medieval knights with four people of color, including two women.
Although European countries were not the only ones to have horses and armor during the Middle Ages, the classic image of a “medieval knight” is Western European.
In perhaps one of the most egregious mishaps, a user asked for a 1943 German soldier and was shown a white man, a black man, and two women of color.
Last week, the company announced that they would be pausing the image generator due to the backlash.
Researchers have found that, due to racism and sexism in society and due to the unconscious biases of some AI researchers, supposedly unbiased AIs will learn to discriminate.
But even some users who agree with the mission of increasing diversity and representation noted that Gemini had gotten it wrong.
Google apologized and admitted that in some cases the tool would ‘overcompensate’ when searching for a wide range of people, even if such a range did not make sense
“I should point out that in certain cases** it is a good thing to portray diversity,” one X user wrote.
“Representation has material consequences for how many women or people of color will pursue certain fields of study. The stupid move here is that Gemini doesn’t do it in a nuanced way.”
Jack Krawczyk, senior product director for Gemini at Google, posted on X on Wednesday that the historical inaccuracies reflect the tech giant’s “global user base” and that it “takes representation and bias seriously.”
“We will continue to do this for open-ended questions (images of a person walking a dog are universal!),” Krawczyk added. ‘Historical contexts have more nuance and we will continue to adapt to that.’
Artificial intelligence is widely expected to be the next technological frontier, with companies clamoring to launch products to take advantage of it.
Google has acknowledged that there are serious problems with Gemini and claims that its staff is urgently working to resolve them.
