You can’t make this crap up.
Bloomberg, which bills itself as a premier source of information upon which the most powerful financial institutions in the country depend, is claiming that the criticisms of Gemini were simply a creation of Right-wingers who have an agenda.
One of the bad things about cultural war is it gets in the way of ppl seeing things clearly
Was the online backlash to Gemini disproportionately right of center? Sure.
But the backlash identified something that is objectively true, low-quality, and embarrassing
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) March 1, 2024
This is Karine Jean-Pierre level of gaslighting. Truly breathtaking in its dishonesty.
I am not kidding. Bloomberg is honestly trying to call criticism of Google Gemini right-wing propaganda:
Within weeks of Google launching the feature, Gemini users noticed a different problem. Starting on Feb. 20 and continuing throughout the week, users on X flooded the social media platform with examples of Gemini refraining from showing White people — even within a historical context where they were likely to dominate depictions, such as when users requested images of the Founding Fathers or a German soldier from 1943. Before long, public figures and news outlets with large right-wing audiences claimed, using dubious evidence, that their tests of Gemini showed Google had a hidden agenda against White people.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, entered the fray, engaging with dozens of posts about the unfounded conspiracy, including several that singled out individual Google leaders as alleged architects of the policy. On Thursday, Google paused Gemini’s image generation of people. The next day, Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan published a blog post attempting to shed light on the company’s decision, but without explaining in depth why the feature had faltered.
Dubious evidence. DUBIOUS EVIDENCE?!
Google basically owns the search business, and Google AI is being built into every single aspect of its product line. And it not only has an anti-White bias, it flat out lies about people that Google executives want you to dislike.
Provably so. I wrote about Gemini’s slander of Matt Taibbi, and you should read his piece. When contacted about it Google didn’t even bother to apologize for slandering and lying about him.
Unlocking this article:
I Wrote What? Google’s AI-Powered Libel Machine:https://t.co/ViD0gfeu0D https://t.co/uIMwnPRTic
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 29, 2024
Bloomberg appreciates Google’s dishonesty enough that it is emulating it. Dubious evidence? Come on.
Google’s release of a product poorly equipped to handle requests for historical images demonstrates the unique challenge tech companies face in preventing their AI systems from amplifying bias and misinformation — especially given competitive pressure to bring AI products to market quickly. Rather than hold off on releasing a flawed image generator, Google attempted a Band-Aid solution.
When Google launched the tool, it included a technical fix to reduce bias in its outputs, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. But Google did so without fully anticipating all the ways the tool could misfire, the people said, and without being transparent about its approach.
This, my friends, is Grade A-level bulls**t. Gemini was introduced as a world-leading product, the result of decades of experience and a year’s worth of work to get it right. They bragged about how Gemini would be baked into the DNA of the company.
There was NOTHING unanticipated about what happened here. It was designed to do exactly what it did. The only thing they didn’t anticipate was the backlash.
How do I know this? Google is one of the largest companies in the world, specializing in precisely this kind of product, and every product they put out does similar things. I have written pieces on how both Google News and Google Search do basically the same level of lying.
Google has a term for how they distort reality: Ethical AI.
Googlers working on ethical AI have struggled with low morale and a feeling of disempowerment over the past year as the company accelerated its pace of rolling out AI products to keep up with rivals such as OpenAI. While the inclusion of people of color in Gemini images showed consideration of diversity, it suggested the company had failed to fully think through the different contexts in which users might seek to create images, said Margaret Mitchell, the former co-head of Google’s Ethical AI research group and chief ethics Scientist at the AI startup Hugging Face. A different consideration of diversity may be appropriate when users are searching for images of how they feel the world should be, rather than how the world in fact was at a particular moment in history.
“The fact that Google is paying attention to skin tone diversity is a leaps-and-bounds advance from where Google was just four years ago. So it’s sort of like, two steps forward, one step back,” Mitchell said. “They should be recognized for actually paying attention to this stuff. It’s just, they needed to go a little bit further to do it right.”
Ethical is a synonym for ideological, of course. Google knows that. You know that. I know that.
And Bloomberg knows that too.
Bloomberg is so concerned to tell you that there is nothing to see here that they put FOUR journalists on the story. It is important to them for you to know that all this controversy is a right-wing plot.
The alternative to people believing that is for them to realize that Big Tech lies to everybody, all the time, in every product they provide.
Controlling the narrative is everything to the Left. And they will say anything to ensure people don’t know the truth.
Read the full article here
