Update: Google reached out to India Today Tech, saying that the guy featured in the meme was not a Google employee and had nothing to do with Google. The event, AGI House, was a third-party event
Original story follows:
Just recently, it was reported that Google employees are being asked to work extra hours on Gemini, after the AI tool was under fire for refusing to generate images of white people. And this weekend, several developers and founders gathered to test the generative AI tool. Videos and photos from the event, called the AGI House, have been surfacing online. In one of the photos, a man was seen sitting wearing a t-shirt with bare breasts on it. The photo quickly went viral, and now even Elon Musk has taken notice of it. The Tesla chief, who often shares memes on social media, was quick to mock the man in the viral photo.
Sharing the viral photo on X, Musk wrote, "Let's ask the Google boob shirt guy." The tech mogul was responding to a tweet that took a subtle jibe at Google's commitment to developing and using AI responsibly.
So, where did the viral picture come from? On March 2nd, 2024, a user on X named @yfilipch shared a video of a presentation by Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the AGI House. In the video, a guy with blonde hair was seen asking about the diversity issue in Google Gemini. He was seen wearing a 3D-printed shirt with a graphic of bare breasts. As soon as the video was uploaded, the tweet got over 1 million views and 1,600 likes in just two days.
A video from the event also surfaced on social media which shows Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, addressing the crowd. In the video, Brin can be seen saying that he came out of his retirement as AI is quite an exciting field.
He also talked about Gemini's image generation incident and said that they "messed up."
"We definitely messed up on the image generation," Brin said and added that according to him, the whole scenario happened due to a lack of testing. "It, for good reasons, upset a lot of people," he said.
In 1998, Brin teamed up with Larry Page to create Google, but he left his role as Alphabet's president in 2019. Despite stepping down, he's still on the board and owns a significant share in the company. Now, he's reportedly back at Google to boost its presence in the highly competitive AI market. During discussions on Saturday, Brin clarified that some of his responses were personal and not official company statements.
As mentioned already, Gemini recently faced criticism for generating historically inaccurate and biased images. The AI system was accused of being "too woke" and getting details about "white people" wrong.
Jack Krawczyk, the Senior Director of Product Management for Gemini Experiences, had also recognised the concerns. He assured that Google takes representation and bias seriously and explained that while the image generation capabilities were designed with these principles in mind, the AI needed fine-tuning, especially for prompts related to historical figures.
Krawczyk stated, "We are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions, and we are working to fix this immediately. Historical contexts have more nuance to them, and we will further tune to accommodate that."
As a response, Google paused the image generation feature of Gemini and issued a statement saying, that they are working on the reported issues. "While we do this, we're going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon," the company noted.