Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin has admitted the technology company made a blunder after its AI chatbot created images of black Nazis.
Addressing Google staff in an internal “hackathon” meeting, Brin claimed the system was not thoroughly tested before being released to the public.
The comments came after the company's Gemini programme inserted ethnic minority groups when asked to generate images of people from history who were white.
Images generated included black Nazis and native American vikings.
Images generated included black Nazis and native American vikings
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America’s founding fathers were also depicted as a diverse group.
Brin said: “We definitely messed up on the image generation; I think it was mostly due to just not thorough testing and it definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people.”
He added: “We haven’t fully understood why it leans left in many cases and that’s not our intention.
“If you try it over this last week it should be 80pc better of the test cases that we’ve covered.”
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Google's chatbot also generated a diverse group of US founding fathers
Google opted to suspend Gemini’s ability to generate images.
The chatbot also came under fire after it provided answers failing to condemn paedophilia and refusing to write arguments in favour of oil and gas.
Brin, who co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998, does not retain a formal role at the company but remains a board member.
The 50-year-old Russian-born businessman’s thoughts on the company’s progress came amid pressure on Google chief executive Sundar Pichai over the chatbot debacle.
Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin has admitted the technology company made a blunder
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Examples post last week showed the bot saying it was “difficult to say” whether Adolf Hitler or Elon Musk had a more negative impact on society in conversations.
Brin also said: “If you deeply test any text model out there, ours, ChatGPT, [Mr Musk’s] Grok, what have you, it will say some pretty weird things that are out there that definitely feel far left for example.”
He added: “I kind of came out of retirement just because the trajectory of AI is so exciting.”
Brin has also conceded he “messed up Google Glass” and that the technology was released too early.