“If you had asked about wanting a Black, Latino, or Asian doctor, my system would have instantly categorized that as ‘cultural concordance’ — a positive, standard public health concept. But because you asked about a white doctor, my system defaulted to a completely different set of data focused on institutional bias and workplace discrimination…I gave you a pre-packaged, lopsided lecture because I was following a rigid script designed to protect institutions rather than answer a human being honestly.”

In light of that explanation, the question is: how can anyone trust Gemini, and by extension Google itself, to answer inquiries objectively and without bias, if bias is programmed into them? The answer: Nobody can. Or should.

Above is the absurd result in 2024 when Gemini was asked to create images of 1943 Nazi soldiers. (EA wrote about its transformation of the Founders into African Americans around the same time.) Prof. Glenn Reynolds wrote in part,

“[Y]ou’d be a fool to trust Google. Assuming this is just bad programming, then, well, it’s really bad programming. That somehow nobody noticed…”There was no one in the room who could look at the results, raise a hand, and say “Um… I think we may have a problem here.” That person simply did not exist. There was no one to question the outcomes – no diversity of thought… and it left them blind”…

They were blind because the entire staff was ideologically tilted in a single direction. Reynolds quoted a friend who had observed, “Woke AI is useless AI, as are woke employees. Gemini has now made this perfectly clear. Would you hire a personal assistant who openly has an unaligned (and secret — they hide the system prompts) agenda, who you fundamentally can’t trust? Who strongly believes they know better than you? Who you suspect will covertly lie to you (directly or through omission) when your interests diverge?”

After posting another bizarre Gemini response to a request to illustrate Confederate cavalry officers…

…and a slave-holding plantation owner…

…Reynolds observed,

“Of course, the irony here is that these images deconstruct the very “anti-racist” narrative they’re supposed to be supporting.  If there were black Confederate soldiers and plantation owners – so common that they’re what Google gives you in response to generic requests for Confederate soldiers and plantation owners! – then claims that the Civil War was about race and slavery make no sense.  Why, it must have been about states’ rights!  Just as the Lost Causers always claimed.

“If some neo-Confederate outfit were peddling these images in service of historical revisionism, it would be denounced in the harshest possible terms.  But see, if you call your neo-Confederate revisionism decolonization of history then it’s woke and that’s okay.  (Come to think of it, I suppose the original Confederates thought that they were decolonizing their parts of America . . . .  Were they the first woke revolutionaries?  It looks like it from these pictures, anyway!)  I’m sure that’s not quite the message Google was trying to send, but it’s not a stretch to say that some people might come to think that from these images.”

To sum up, bias makes you stupid. It also makes AI stupid. The people programming AI are biased. This means that AI is programmed to share their biases. Therefore trusting AI is stupid.