Google suspends Gemini chatbot's ability to generate pictures of people

Google said on Thursday it's temporarily stopping its Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot from generating images of people a day after apologising for “inaccuracies” in historical depictions that it was creating.

Gemini users this week posted screenshots on social media of historically white-dominated scenes with racially diverse characters that they say it generated, leading critics to raise questions about whether the company is over-correcting for the risk of racial bias in its AI model.

“We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature,” Google said in a post on the social media platform X. “While we do this, we’re going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon.”

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Previous studies have shown AI image-generators can amplify racial and gender stereotypes found in their training data, and without filters are more likely to generate lighter-skinned men when asked to generate a person in various contexts.

Google said on Wednesday that it's “aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions” and that it's "working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately".

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