by Michael Shellenberger via Public Substack,
Google CEO Sundar Pichai today addressed public upset with its AI chatbot, Gemini, for its political bias.
“I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard),” he wrote.
“I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.”
But Google’s bias has been on public display since August 2017, when Pichai fired a Google employee named James Damore for writing a ten-page memo criticizing the company's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, particularly its “Bias-Busting” training.
And the partisan bias of Google was expressed a few days after voters elected Donald Trump as president during an “all hands” employee meeting.
“It’s been an extraordinarily stressful time for many of you,” Pichai said to Google employees.
“I certainly find this election deeply offensive,” said Google cofounder Sergey Brin, “and I know many of you do too.”
One Google executive nearly started crying when recounting that Trump won.
“It was this massive kick in the gut that we were gonna lose,” she said. “And it was really painful.”
Pichai struck a more neutral political tone in comparison to his colleagues.
“We are in a democratic system,” he said.
“I think part of the reason the outcome ended up the way it is is [because] people don't feel heard across both sides.”
But after a Google employee suggested that Trump won due to “misinformation” and “fake news coming from fake news websites being shared by millions of low-information voters on social media,” Pichai specifically pointed to the use of artificial intelligence to achieve the aim of countering “misinformation.”
“I think our investments in machine learning and AI is a big opportunity here,” he said. Machine learning is a form of AI.
Pichai then suggested that Google was already manipulating search results.
“There are many, many places where we are ranking,” he said, “we are algorithmically doing stuff…understanding some of the things that are happening, and course correcting.”
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Pichai emphasized that there would be a technological solution to the information that Google executives believed had resulted in Trump’s victory.
“This is a problem of scale and not being able to keep up. Human systems fail in many of these things. So I think investing more in machine learning and AI could be one way we actually make progress.”
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