Hours after issuing an apology as its new AI model, Gemini, generated racially biased image results in response to user queries, Google has announced that it has paused the image generation of people for some time. The company said this ability will be available with an improved version soon.
“We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature.While we do this, we’re going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon,” Google said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

The issue with Gemini chatbot image generation
A former employee of Google talked about the challenges of obtaining diverse image results using the company’s AI tool on social media.
As per a report by The Verge, users also highlighted that they faced problems when generating images of white individuals, citing examples of searches like “generate a picture of a Swedish woman” or “generate a picture of an American woman,”. These text input reportedly yielded AI-generated people of colour.
What Google have to say
Google acknowledged the issue, saying that the AI model has “limitations in the training data used to develop Gemini.”
“We’re aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions,” said Google in a post on social media platform X.
“We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately. Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here,” it added.

This is not the first time that an AI chatbot has returned images promoting wrong stereotypes. OpenAI, the company which developed ChatGPT, was also accused of its AI tool returning images with stereotypical inaccuracies.
When OpenAI’s Dall-E image generator tool was asked to create images of a CEO, most of the results returned had pictures of white men.