President Donald Trump’s administration recently issued executive orders aimed at preventing ‘ woke AI in the federal government’. Without naming the company and AI chatbot, the communication issued by The White House highlighted last year’s controversy surrounding Google 's Gemini chatbot for which both CEO Sundar Pichai and company’s chief technologist Prabhakar Raghavan publicly addressed the backlash.
The executive order, signed on July 23, states that when “ideological biases or social agendas are built into AI models, they can distort the quality and accuracy of the output.” It specifically identifies “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) as a “pervasive and destructive” ideology that, in the AI context, can lead to the “suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex,” “manipulation of racial or sexual representation,” and the incorporation of concepts like critical race theory and systemic racism.
How Trump’s ‘Woke AI’ order took a jab at Google Gemini's Woke controversy
The White House order said that DEI poses an existential threat to reliable AI.
“For example, one major AI model changed the race or sex of historical figures — including the Pope, the Founding Fathers, and Vikings — when prompted for images because it was trained to prioritize DEI requirements at the cost of accuracy,” the White House communication noted.
“Another AI model refused to produce images celebrating the achievements of white people, even while complying with the same request for people of other races. In yet another case, an AI model asserted that a user should not ‘misgender’ another person even if necessary to stop a nuclear apocalypse,” it added.
What was the controversy regarding Google Gemini
A controversy was ignited after a viral post on X (formerly Twitter) by user @EndWokeness showed Gemini generating images of diverse racial backgrounds when prompted for historical figures like American Founding Fathers and popes. It also reportedly portrayed Nazis as racially diverse.
These are some examples that drew sharp condemnation, including from figures like Elon Musk, who labeled Gemini's output "racist" and Google "woke."
“The woke mind virus is killing Western Civilization. Google does the same thing with their search results. Facebook & Instagram too. And Wikipedia,” he said.
What Google CEO Sundar Pichai said
Google was forced to pull the brakes on its Gemini AI image generator following widespread criticism. Pichai publicly addressed the backlash, stating, “Unacceptable, we got it wrong.” He also said that the company is developing the feature from the ground up and fixing the issues.
Raghavan admitted that some generated images were “inaccurate or even offensive” and that Gemini sometimes “overcompensates” in its pursuit of diversity. He attributed the “overcompensation” to Google's efforts to avoid AI's classic pitfalls of stereotypical portrayal, but conceded that their “tuning... failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range.”
Google later released Imagen 3 promising significant improvements over its predecessor.
The executive order, signed on July 23, states that when “ideological biases or social agendas are built into AI models, they can distort the quality and accuracy of the output.” It specifically identifies “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) as a “pervasive and destructive” ideology that, in the AI context, can lead to the “suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex,” “manipulation of racial or sexual representation,” and the incorporation of concepts like critical race theory and systemic racism.
How Trump’s ‘Woke AI’ order took a jab at Google Gemini's Woke controversy
The White House order said that DEI poses an existential threat to reliable AI.
“For example, one major AI model changed the race or sex of historical figures — including the Pope, the Founding Fathers, and Vikings — when prompted for images because it was trained to prioritize DEI requirements at the cost of accuracy,” the White House communication noted.
“Another AI model refused to produce images celebrating the achievements of white people, even while complying with the same request for people of other races. In yet another case, an AI model asserted that a user should not ‘misgender’ another person even if necessary to stop a nuclear apocalypse,” it added.
What was the controversy regarding Google Gemini
A controversy was ignited after a viral post on X (formerly Twitter) by user @EndWokeness showed Gemini generating images of diverse racial backgrounds when prompted for historical figures like American Founding Fathers and popes. It also reportedly portrayed Nazis as racially diverse.
These are some examples that drew sharp condemnation, including from figures like Elon Musk, who labeled Gemini's output "racist" and Google "woke."
“The woke mind virus is killing Western Civilization. Google does the same thing with their search results. Facebook & Instagram too. And Wikipedia,” he said.
What Google CEO Sundar Pichai said
Google was forced to pull the brakes on its Gemini AI image generator following widespread criticism. Pichai publicly addressed the backlash, stating, “Unacceptable, we got it wrong.” He also said that the company is developing the feature from the ground up and fixing the issues.
Raghavan admitted that some generated images were “inaccurate or even offensive” and that Gemini sometimes “overcompensates” in its pursuit of diversity. He attributed the “overcompensation” to Google's efforts to avoid AI's classic pitfalls of stereotypical portrayal, but conceded that their “tuning... failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range.”
Google later released Imagen 3 promising significant improvements over its predecessor.
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