- Hezbollah fires at Israel as wars rage on Yom Kippur
- Analysts warn more detail needed on new China economic measures
- China tees up fresh spending to boost ailing economy
- China says will issue special bonds to boost ailing economy
- China offers $325 bn in fiscal stimulus for ailing economy
- Dodgers drop Padres 2-0 to advance in MLB playoffs
- Alexei Navalny wrote he knew he would die in prison in new memoir
- Last-minute legal ruling allows betting on US election
- Despite hurricanes, Floridians refuse to leave 'paradise'
- Israel observes Yom Kippur amid firestorm over Lebanon strikes
- Trump demonizes migrants in dark, misleading speech
- X says 'alert' to manipulation efforts after pro-Russia bots report
- US, European markets rise before Boeing unveils sweeping job cuts
- Small Quebec company dominates one part of NHL hockey: jerseys
- Comoros shock Tunisia, Salah, Mbeumo strike in AFCON qualifiers
- Boeing to cut 10% of workforce as it sees big Q3 loss
- Germany win in Nations League as 10-man Dutch rescue point
- Undav brace sends Germany to victory against Bosnia
- Israel says fired at 'threat' near UN position in Lebanon
- Want to film in Paris? No sexism allowed
- Ecuador's last mountain iceman dies at 80
- Milton leaves at least 16 dead, millions without power in Florida
- Senegal set to announce breakaway development agenda: PM
- UN says 2 peacekeepers wounded in south Lebanon explosions
- Injury-hit Australia thrash 'embarrassing' Pakistan at Women's T20 World Cup
- Internal TikTok documents show prioritization of traffic over well-being
- Israel says fired at 'immediate threat' near UN position in Lebanon
- New US coach Pochettino hails Pulisic but worries over workload
- Brazil orders closure of 2,000 betting sites
- UK govt urged to raise pro-democracy tycoon's case with China
- Sculptor Lalanne's animal creations sell for $59 mn
- From Tesla to Trump: Behind Musk's giant leap into politics
- US, European markets rise as investors weigh rates, earnings
- In Colombia, children trade plastic waste for school supplies
- Supercharged hurricanes trigger 'perfect storm' for disinformation
- JPMorgan Chase profits top estimates, bank sees 'resilient' US economy
- Djokovic proves staying power as he progresses to Shanghai semi-finals
- Sheffield Utd boss Wilder 'numb' after Baldock death
- Little progress at key meet ahead of COP29 climate summit
- Fans immerse themselves in Marina Abramovic's first China exhibition
- Israel says conducting review after UN peacekeepers wounded in Lebanon
- 'Party atmosphere': Skygazers treated to another aurora show
- Djokovic 'overwhelmed' after 'greatest rival' Nadal's retirement
- Zelensky in Berlin says hopes war with Russia will end next year
- Kyrgyzstan opens rare probe into glacier destruction
- European Mediterranean states discuss Middle East, migration
- Djokovic proves staying power as progresses to Shanghai semi-finals
- Hurricane Milton leaves at least 16 dead as Florida cleans up
- Britain face 'ultimate challenge' in America's Cup duel with New Zealand
- Lebanon calls for 'immediate' ceasefire in Israel-Hezbollah war
Gemini's flawed AI racial images seen as warning of tech titans' power
For people at the trend-setting tech festival here, the scandal that erupted after Google's Gemini chatbot cranked out images of Black and Asian Nazi soldiers was seen as a warning about the power artificial intelligence can give tech titans.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai last month slammed as "completely unacceptable" errors by his company's Gemini AI app, after gaffes such as the images of ethnically diverse Nazi troops forced it to temporarily stop users from creating pictures of people.
Social media users mocked and criticized Google for the historically inaccurate images, like those showing a female black US senator from the 1800s -- when the first such senator was not elected until 1992.
"We definitely messed up on the image generation," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said at a recent AI "hackathon," adding that the company should have tested Gemini more thoroughly.
Folks interviewed at the popular South by Southwest arts and tech festival in Austin said the Gemini stumble highlights the inordinate power a handful of companies have over the artificial intelligence platforms that are poised to change the way people live and work.
"Essentially, it was too 'woke,'" said Joshua Weaver, a lawyer and tech entrepreneur, meaning Google had gone overboard in its effort to project inclusion and diversity.
Google quickly corrected its errors, but the underlying problem remains, said Charlie Burgoyne, chief executive of the Valkyrie applied science lab in Texas.
He equated Google's fix of Gemini to putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.
While Google long had the luxury of having time to refine its products, it is now scrambling in an AI race with Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and others, Weaver noted, adding, "They are moving faster than they know how to move."
Mistakes made in an effort at cultural sensitivity are flashpoints, particularly given the tense political divisions in the United States, a situation exacerbated by Elon Musk's X platform, the former Twitter.
"People on Twitter are very gleeful to celebrate any embarrassing thing that happens in tech," Weaver said, adding that reaction to the Nazi gaffe was "overblown."
The mishap did, however, call into question the degree of control those using AI tools have over information, he maintained.
In the coming decade, the amount of information -- or misinformation -- created by AI could dwarf that generated by people, meaning those controlling AI safeguards will have huge influence on the world, Weaver said.
- Bias-in, Bias-out -
Karen Palmer, an award-winning mixed-reality creator with Interactive Films Ltd., said she could imagine a future in which someone gets into a robo-taxi and, "if the AI scans you and thinks that there are any outstanding violations against you... you'll be taken into the local police station," not your intended destination.
AI is trained on mountains of data and can be put to work on a growing range of tasks, from image or audio generation to determining who gets a loan or whether a medical scan detects cancer.
But that data comes from a world rife with cultural bias, disinformation and social inequity -- not to mention online content that can include casual chats between friends or intentionally exaggerated and provocative posts -- and AI models can echo those flaws.
With Gemini, Google engineers tried to rebalance the algorithms to provide results better reflecting human diversity.
The effort backfired.
"It can really be tricky, nuanced and subtle to figure out where bias is and how it's included," said technology lawyer Alex Shahrestani, a managing partner at Promise Legal law firm for tech companies.
Even well-intentioned engineers involved with training AI can't help but bring their own life experience and subconscious bias to the process, he and others believe.
Valkyrie's Burgoyne also castigated big tech for keeping the inner workings of generative AI hidden in "black boxes," so users are unable to detect any hidden biases.
"The capabilities of the outputs have far exceeded our understanding of the methodology," he said.
Experts and activists are calling for more diversity in teams creating AI and related tools, and greater transparency as to how they work -- particularly when algorithms rewrite users' requests to "improve" results.
A challenge is how to appropriately build in perspectives of the world's many and diverse communities, Jason Lewis of the Indigenous Futures Resource Center and related groups said here.
At Indigenous AI, Jason works with farflung indigenous communities to design algorithms that use their data ethically while reflecting their perspectives on the world, something he does not always see in the "arrogance" of big tech leaders.
His own work, he told a group, stands in "such a contrast from Silicon Valley rhetoric, where there's a top-down 'Oh, we're doing this because we're going to benefit all humanity' bullshit, right?"
His audience laughed.
P.Mathewson--AMWN