Tech Company Influence on Elections and the Importance of Monitoring

Last year, Google CEO Sundar Pinchai went on a media offensive to reassure the public and policymakers that he was being responsible with Artificial Intelligence, or AI. “You will see us be bold and ship things,” he told the New York Times in March, “but we are going to be very responsible in how we do it.”

But the AI product Google shipped, Gemini, turned out to have a strong racial bias. When asked to depict the Pope, Vikings, and America’s founding fathers, Gemini refused to depict them as white.

Gemini responded with misinformation when asked about this misrepresentation, claiming that it “aimed to provide a more accurate and inclusive representation of the historical context.”

To its credit, Google took the image creation feature of Gemini offline, saying it was not “working as intended.” And, to be fair, tech firms often ship new products aware that there are programming bugs.

But Gemini remains up and running and is a source of misinformation and, arguably, “hate speech.”