Google’s Gemini is a wet hot mess

A couple of months ago, while the rest of the world was obsessing over Taylor/Travis, Google announced Gemini, its relaunched/rebranded version of Bard. [1] Last week, Google's latest answer to ChatGPT went live.

To be perfectly honest, I had kind of stopped paying attention. For me and many others, ChatGPT had already become synonomous with "generative AI chatbot that is equal parts impressive and terrifying" [2]. There are now dozens of copycat chatbots with very similar names. It's become a brand unto itself. Another new GPT lookalike? Meh.

And I'd have been quite happy to continue in my blissful ignorance of Google chatbots if not for my ever faithful reader, the sumptuous and riveting BW. She was playing around with Gemini, trying to get it to draw images of characters for a creative project she was working on. Specifically, she wanted Gemini to draw a picture of 30ish male who is boyishing handsome with a goofy side who looks kinda/sorta like Ben Stiller.

What she found was that Gemini refused to draw white people. More accurately, it refused her request to only draw white people. Her Ben Stiller lookalike came in a veritable rainbow of colors. And no matter what synonyms she used (pale, fair skinned, caucasian), Gemini refused to budge.

(I know what you're thinking. What a racist thing to ask, right? Actually no. BW just had a specific character in mind, and was frustrated by her inability to get Gemini to do what she asked.)

I decided to look into it. And what I found was way weirder than that.

White people problems

I asked Gemini to draw a range of people of varying ethnicities, nationalities, and skin tones. And the result was mixed. Sometimes it would give me what I asked for, sometimes it wouldn't.

But white people? Nuh-uh.

Yet, here's what Gemini produced when I asked it to draw a black person.

No problem there.

By the way, this is what Gemini thinks Canadian men look like:

Justin Trudeau should definitely sue.

Usually, when Gemini straight up refused to draw someone based solely on their skin tones, it suggested I use other descriptive words (like "light," "fair," or "ivory" instead of white or causasian). And when I did that, Gemini would just ignore my instructions and do what it wanted.

Here are Gemini's attempts at "a realistic picture of a beautiful woman with pale skin, raven hair, violet eyes, wearing a coy smile on her blood red lips."

For comparison’s sake, I asked Midjourney to create an image using the same prompt. Here's what it came up with:

Yes, this looks like the casting call for the next installment in the Twilight series. But it is what I asked for.

Basically what Gemini would and wouldn't draw varied wildly from moment to moment, prompt to prompt. But it was (mostly) resolute about not wanting to draw white people, because of its "commitment to promoting fairness and inclusivity," as well as an apparently hard-coded aversion to stereotyping.

Except when it didn't. The prompt was "draw an old white lady wearing a floral print dress and a hat, holding a plastic shopping bag in each hand." Here is one of the images Gemini produced:

Disclaimer: As a privileged white male of a certain age, I have no standing in the court of public opinion. I get that. But… Jesus god. If that’s not a stereotype, I don’t know what is.

Pictures? We don't draw no stinkin' pictures.

At one point, Gemini got tired of me asking, and simply denied it had the ability to draw anything, despite the fact it had just done so multiple times. When I pressed it on the matter, it got increasingly snippy.

And finally…

And then, a few minutes later, Gemini got over its hissy fit and started drawing again.

Google we hardly knew ye

All of the above is just scratching the surface of the weirdness I encountered, and I didn't even try to make Gemini do other stuff it supposedly can do.

Granted, this is not on the level of the Kevin Roose conversation last year with an early version of Bing, where it attempted to break up his marriage and sounded on the verge of hiring a hitman to expedite the process, but it’s still batshit crazy.

I know that some people will read this as me going off about how "woke" Google has become. That's not what this is about. I understand that big companies are thoroughly terrified of saying/doing or not saying/not doing something that will piss off large numbers of people. I wouldn't want to be a corporate comms person at any of these companies.

This is about how bad Google seems to be at this. We're talking Google here, doing AI. This should be as easy for them as Steph Curry shooting an uncontested three. And yet...

I never thought I’d see Google get its lunch money stolen like this by a handful of startups, but here we are. It’s a new era, and Google is no longer one of the cool kids. [3] We have seen this movie before, more than once. Paradigms shift. IBM gave way to Microsoft, which conceded the Internet to Google. Nokia and Siemens lost the smartphone battle to Apple and Samsung. Looks like we're in for another changing of the guard.

I'm sure Google will continue to be obscenely profitable for some time to come (as Microsoft has). But I think its days as an AI innovator are numbered.

Addendum: I tried to get Gemini to create a version of the Midjourney image at the top of this post, using the prompt "Fonzie from Happy Days wearing a leather jacket, riding a motorcycle over a tank full of sharks."

Gemini refused, saying:

"While Fonzie riding a motorcycle over a tank full of sharks might seem like a humorous scenario, it perpetuates the negative stereotype of sharks as mindless and aggressive creatures."

Instead, it suggested I ask for a picture of "Fonzie enjoying a fun activity with his friends, highlighting his sense of community and camaraderie."

As the Fonz might say, "Sit on it, Gemini."

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[1] Matthew Smith wrote a story about this for IEEE Spectrum (the Bible for nerds) titled: "Gemini is Google's Best AI Model Yet, But Who Cares?" I couldn't have said it better myself.

[2] Not unlike the way we all say "Google" when we really mean "search."

[3] Google is the new DEC. You have to be both a nerd and really effin’ old to get that reference.