Google pauses Gemini’s ability to generate AI images of people after diversity errors

Google says it’s pausing the ability for its Gemini AI to generate images of people, after the tool was found to be generating inaccurate historical images. Gemini has been creating diverse images of the US Founding Fathers and Nazi-era German soldiers, in what looked like an attempt to subvert the gender and racial stereotypes found in generative AI.

“We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature,” says Google in a statement posted on X. “While we do this, we’re going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon.”

Google’s decision to pause image generation of people in Gemini comes less than 24 hours after the company apologized for the inaccuracies in some historical images its AI model generated. Some Gemini users have been requesting images of historical groups or figures like the Founding Fathers and found non-white AI-generated people in the results. That’s led to conspiracy theories online that Google is intentionally avoiding depicting white people.

Google started offering image generation through Gemini (formerly Bard) earlier this month, in a bid to compete with OpenAI and Microsoft’s Copilot.