I'm 97% Convinced This Apology by Google's Co-Founder for His Ridiculous AI Chatbot Might Itself Be AI
No doubt by now you're aware of the disastrous roll out of Google's "Gemini" AI that the company took down on the first day due it's, let's just call it loose interpretation of reality. If you're not, here's a quick refresher:
And a few examples of Gemini's view of the world:
Well after a week and a half of Google getting dragged across the internet, we've finally heard from an executive addressing this boondoggle they've invested years and billions of dollars developing:
Source - In rare public remarks, Google co-founder Sergey Brin has acknowledged that the company 'messed up' its Gemini artificial intelligence launch after the tool generated historically inaccurate images.
'We definitely messed up on the image generation,' Brin told entrepreneurs at a gathering on Saturday at San Francisco's AGI House, according to video shared by an attendee.
'I think it was mostly due to just not thorough testing. It definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people on the images,' Brin said. …
'The images really prompted a lot of people to deeply test the base text models,' Brin noted of the controversy. …
Brin acknowledged that Gemini appears tilted to the left politically in many of its responses.
'We haven't fully understood why it leans left in many cases' but 'that's not our intention,' he said.
First of all, Sergey Brin is a multi-billionaire who helped found the biggest source of information in the history of mankind. I'm a thousandaire whose greatest tech achievement is setting up an Eventbrite page for a comedy show at a brewery. (Tickets are on sale now!) And in a roundabout way, I needed Brin's company to do even that simple, childlike task. So far be it for me to lecture him.
But this isn't about "tilting" or "leaning" left. Or right, for that matter. Gemini isn't a picture frame that's a few degrees off of true level that needs a microadjustment. This is about asking for a image of NHL players and getting Intuit women. This is about black Norse warriors and female Asian Nazi Stormtroopers. It's about an AI programmed to say that a nuclear holocaust would be preferable to offending Glamour's 2015 Woman of the Year:
This is neither a tilt or a lean. It's the technology that's going to essentially run every aspect of our lives for the foreseeable future being programmed with a worldview that's upside down, inside out, and backwards.
But that's not what I'm here to discuss. I've buried the lede, because we need to talk about the video of Brin's remarks:
Here's the guy who asked the question:
I get that Silicon Valley types are a different breed. As my sainted mom once described a weird, eccentric guy from our neighborhood - until I begged her to never, ever use this expression again - these tech people are "a beat off." So I get that Brin is going to show up to a meeting of AGI experts looking like he escaped from a Soviet Gulag and spent months making his way across Eastern Europe on foot dressed in a shirt he made out of a horse blanket. That comes with the tech mogul territory.
But what's with the tittay shirt? You're about to have a face-to-face with the head of the biggest tech giant in the English speaking world, someone who's more powerful than your typical king throughout most of human history, so you slip on the t-shirt with the spectacular B-cups and you're good to go?
This is one of those looks where I can't help but ask the one wearing it, "I'm just curious. Walk me through your morning. You go into the closet, you take two shirts off the rack, you're holding them up on hangers, deciding which one to wear. What was the one you rejected? What was on it that made you say, 'I'm meeting with the head of a project that's ushering in a bold new era in how information is disseminated to all of humankind. I can't wear this. I'll look like an asshole in front of everybody'?" Unless you're really, really, really behind on laundry, I can't fathom sporting this look in the workplace. Much less raising your hand to ask a question of your boss.
Which is why I'm pretty convinced this video is AI-generated. And we're being gaslit. Someone from Google asked Gemini "Create a video of our founder explaining what went wrong with your crazy image-generating algorithm at a meeting of AGI developers." And the guy with the nice rack shirt is what it imagined.
But then again, if this is the kind of guy working on this project, it explains a LOT. Our species is doomed.