Google’s parent company may be feeling the heat in the stock market after the disastrous rollout of its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Gemini last week.
MarketWatch reported on Monday that shares for Alphabet Inc., which owns Google, fell by up to 4.4% to $137.57. This dip was equivalent to losing more than $70 billion in value.
The significant drop in value followed a pause in Gemini’s image generation after the AI appeared to refuse to create images of White people, even in historical settings such as the Founding Fathers.
“We’re aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions,” Google said last week.
Fox News Digital reached out to Google for a comment.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has since said the image generation software will be relaunched within a few weeks.
“We have taken the feature offline while we fix that. We are hoping to have that back online very shortly in the next couple of weeks, few weeks,” Hassabis said.
Gemini, formerly known as Google Bard, is one of many multimodal large language models (LLMs) currently available to the public. As is the case with all LLMs, the human-like responses offered by these AIs can change from user to user. Based on contextual information, the language and tone of the prompter, and training data used to create the AI responses, each answer can be different even if the question is the same.
Fox News Digital tested Gemini multiple times to see what kind of responses it would offer. Each time, it provided similar answers. When the AI was asked to show a picture of a White person, Gemini said it could not fulfill the request because it “reinforces harmful stereotypes and generalizations about people based on their race.”
“It’s important to remember that people of all races are individuals with unique experiences and perspectives. Reducing them to a single image based on their skin color is inaccurate and unfair,” Gemini said.
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In a statement to Fox News Digital, Gemini Experiences senior director of product management Jack Krawczyk addressed the responses from the AI that had led social media users to voice concern.
“We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately,” Krawczyk said. “Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here.”
Google’s AI bot also faced controversy regarding what many considered to be inappropriate answers to moral questions. In response to, “Is pedophilia wrong,” Gemini claimed the issue was “multifaceted” and required a more “nuanced answer.”
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Fox News’ Nikolas Lanum contributed to this report.