For people at the trend-setting tech festival here, the scandal that erupted after Google’s chatbot, Gemini, cranked out images of black and Asian nazi soldiers was seen as a warning about the power artificial intelligence (AI) can give tech titans.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai last month slammed as “completely unacceptable” errors by his company’s Gemini AI app, after gaffes such as the images of ethnically diverse Nazi troops forced it to temporarily stop users from creating pictures of people.
Social media users mocked and criticized Google for the historically inaccurate images, like those showing a female black US senator from the 1800s — when the first such senator was not elected until 1992.
Photo: AP
“We definitely messed up on the image generation,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin said at a AI “hackathon,” adding that the company should have tested Gemini more thoroughly.
People interviewed at the popular South by Southwest arts and tech festival in Austin said the Gemini stumble highlights the inordinate power a handful of companies have over the AI platforms that are poised to change the way people live and work.
“Essentially, it was too ‘woke,’” said Joshua Weaver, a lawyer and tech entrepreneur, meaning Google had gone overboard in its effort to project inclusion and diversity.
Google quickly corrected its errors, but the underlying problem remains, said Charlie Burgoyne, chief executive of the Valkyrie applied science lab in Texas.
He equated Google’s fix of Gemini to putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.
While Google long had the luxury of having time to refine its products, it is now scrambling in an AI race with Microsoft Corp, OpenAI, Anthropic and others, Weaver said. “They are moving faster than they know how to move.”
Mistakes made in an effort at cultural sensitivity are flashpoints, particularly given the tense political divisions in the US, a situation exacerbated by Elon Musk’s X platform, the former Twitter.
“People on Twitter are very gleeful to celebrate any embarrassing thing that happens in tech,” Weaver said, adding that reaction to the Nazi gaffe was “overblown.”
However, the mishap called into question the degree of control those using AI tools have over information, Weaver said.
In the coming decade, the amount of information — or misinformation — created by AI could dwarf that generated by people, meaning those controlling AI safeguards would have huge influence on the world, he said.
Karen Palmer, an award-winning mixed-reality creator with Interactive Films Ltd, said she could imagine a future in which someone gets into a robo-taxi and, “if the AI scans you and thinks that there are any outstanding violations against you ... you’ll be taken into the local police station,” not your intended destination.
AI is trained on mountains of data and can be put to work on a growing range of tasks, from image or audio generation to determining who gets a loan or whether a medical scan detects cancer.
However, that data comes from a world rife with cultural bias, disinformation and social inequity — not to mention online content that can include casual chats between friends or intentionally exaggerated and provocative posts — and AI models can echo those flaws. With Gemini, Google engineers tried to rebalance the algorithms to provide results better reflecting human diversity.
The effort backfired.
“It can really be tricky, nuanced and subtle to figure out where bias is and how it’s included,” said technology lawyer Alex Shahrestani, a managing partner at Promise Legal law firm for tech companies.
Even well-intentioned engineers involved with training AI cannot help but bring their own life experience and subconscious bias to the process, he said.
Burgoyne also castigated big tech for keeping the inner workings of generative AI hidden in “black boxes,” so users are unable to detect any hidden biases.
“The capabilities of the outputs have far exceeded our understanding of the methodology,” he said.
Experts and activists are calling for more diversity in teams creating AI and related tools, and greater transparency as to how they work — particularly when algorithms rewrite users’ requests to “improve” results.
A challenge is how to appropriately build in perspectives of the world’s many and diverse communities, the Indigenous Futures Resource Center codirector Jason Lewis said.
At Indigenous AI, Jason works with far-flung indigenous communities to design algorithms that use their data ethically while reflecting their perspectives on the world, something he does not always see in the “arrogance” of big tech leaders.
He said his own work stands in “such a contrast from Silicon Valley rhetoric, where there’s a top-down ‘Oh, we’re doing this because we’re going to benefit all humanity’ bullshit, right?”
His audience laughed.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”