Why Google’s AI tool was slammed for showing images of people of colour

Gemini’s attempt to correct the marginalisation of ethnic minorities has backfired.

America’s founding fathers depicted as Black women and Ancient Greek warriors as Asian women and men – this was the world reimagined by Google’s generative AI tool, Gemini, in late February.

The launch of the new image generation feature sent social media platforms into a flurry of intrigue and confusion. When users entered any prompts to create AI-generated images of people, Gemini was largely showing them results featuring people of colour – whether appropriate or not.

X users shared laughs while repeatedly trying to generate images of white people on Gemini and failing to do so. While some instances were deemed humorous online, others, such as images of brown people wearing World War II Nazi uniforms with swastikas on them, prompted outrage, prompting Google to temporarily disable the tool.

Here is more about Google Gemini and the recent controversy surrounding it.