Google CEO Sundar Pichai
has sent a strongly-worded memo to employees on the recent controversy regarding its AI chatbot Gemini's image generation too. In an internal memo to employees, which first appeared in Semafor, Pichai called the Gemini's responses around race unacceptable and vowed to make structural changes to fix the problem.
Google suspended its Gemini image creation tool last week after it generated embarrassing and offensive results, in some cases declining to depict white people.
The search results even inaccurately portrayed the races of Google’s own co-founders. Post the controversy, Google publicly apologised for “missing the mark” and said that it’s working to re-enable image generation in the coming weeks. The company accepted that it "over compensated" for diversity in some cases. Pichai's memo to employees is the first time that the Google CEO has spoken on the issue.
Here's the Google CEO Sundar Pichai's letter as it appeared on Semafor:
I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard). I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.
Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts. No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.
Our mission to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.
We’ll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We are looking across all of this and will make the necessary changes.
Even as we learn from what went wrong here, we should also build on the product and technical announcements we’ve made in AI over the last several weeks. That includes some foundational advances in our underlying models e.g. our 1 million long-context window breakthrough and our open models, both of which have been well received.
We know what it takes to create great products that are used and beloved by billions of people and businesses, and with our infrastructure and research expertise we have an incredible springboard for the AI wave. Let’s focus on what matters most: building helpful products that are deserving of our users’ trust.
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