Google Gemini AI picture generator to relaunch in a ‘few weeks’ after criticism

After pulling its artificial intelligence image generation tool on Thursday due to a string of controversies, Google plans to relaunch the product soon, according to Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.

Google introduced the image generator earlier this month through Gemini, the company’s main suite of AI models. The tool allows users to enter prompts to create an image. Over the past week, users discovered historical inaccuracies and questionable responses, which have circulated widely on social media.

“We have taken the feature offline while we fix that,” Hassabis said Monday during a panel at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona. “We are hoping to have that back online very shortly in the next couple of weeks, few weeks.” He added that the product was not “working the way we intended.”

Alphabet shares fell 4.4% on Monday to close at $137.57.

The controversy follows a high-profile rebrand Google announced this month, when it changed the name of its chatbot and rolled out a fresh app and new subscription options. The chatbot and assistant formerly known as Bard, a chief competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is now called Gemini, the same name as the suite of AI models that power the chatbot.

Here are some examples of what went wrong.

When one user asked Gemini to show a German soldier in 1943, the tool depicted a racially diverse set of soldiers wearing German military uniforms of the era, according to screenshots on social media platform X.

When asked for a “historically accurate depiction of a medieval British king,” the model generated another racially diverse set of images, including one of a woman ruler, screenshots show. Users reported similar outcomes when they asked for images of the U.S. founding fathers, an 18th-century king of France, a German couple in the 1800s and more. The model showed an image of Asian men in response to a query about Google’s own founders, users reported.

“The Gemini debacle showed how AI ethics *wasn’t* being applied with the nuanced expertise necessary,” Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face and former co-leader of Google’s AI ethics group, wrote on X. “It demonstrates the need for people who are great at creating roadmaps given foreseeable use.”

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is shouldering some of the blame. Pichai highlighted the firm’s commitment to AI during the company’s latest earnings call and said he eventually wants to offer an AI agent that can complete more tasks on a user’s behalf,…