The Patriot Post® · Google Insiders Spill It on the AI Fiasco

We’ve been played. But it shouldn’t surprise us.

Last month, to an abundance of hype, Google launched its Gemini AI tool. As we noted at the time, it didn’t go well. For example, if you asked for an image of a Founding Father, you got a black George Washington, complete with a powdered wig and a Continental Army uniform. If Nazis are your thing, Gemini served you up yet another black guy — or maybe an Asian woman in gray Wehrmacht gear. Anything but the blond-haired, blue-eyed master-racer we’ve come to associate with Hitler’s Third Reich. An image of the pope, you ask? Behold, the world’s first female pontiff of color.

All this was ridiculous, and it caused Google to yank Gemini off the market faster than a hoodlum yanks iPhones off their tethers at a Bay Area Apple Store. It was an abject embarrassment, after all, and embarrassment isn’t good for the Google brand.

And it wasn’t just embarrassing. It was also costly. Really, really costly. As Fox Business reports, within a few days of the Gemini misfire, shares of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had fallen 5.4%, while its market cap had fallen from $1.798 trillion to $1.702 trillion. For those keeping count, that’s a loss of more than $96 billion.

As one might imagine, this market, er, bloodbath caught the attention of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who promptly rattled off a memo to staff, calling the Gemini debacle “unacceptable” and adding: “Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.”

Nice memo, but he’s lying when he uses words like “unbiased” and “accurate” to describe Google’s products. Any cursory search of a controversial political topic on either the company’s flagship search engine or its Google News aggregator makes it clear that Google isn’t “unbiased.” But we digress.

For a better sense of just how ridiculously woke the Gemini chatbot was, check out this episode of our “Pop Culture Contrarian” podcast, in which we put Gemini through the paces with one seemingly straightforward but ultimately confounding question after another.

Jack Krawczyk, Gemini’s senior director of product management and an anti-white racist clown in his spare time, tried to put a favorable spin on the Gemini faceplant: “We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately,” he said. “Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here.”

That was putting it mildly. And, as it turns out, it wasn’t putting it honestly.

In a revealing article at The Free Press titled “Google’s Woke AI Wasn’t a Mistake. We Know. We Were There,” Shaun Maguire was more candid and more truthful. Maguire, who was a partner at Google Ventures, the company’s investment wing, from 2016 until 2019, said he wasn’t shocked at all. “When the first Google Gemini photos popped up on my X feed, I thought to myself: Here we go again. And: Of course. Because I know Google well. Google Gemini’s failures revealed how broken Google’s culture is in such a visually obvious way to the world. But what happened was not a one-off incident. It was a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon that has been taking over the company for years.”

What we have here, then, is a hard-left company that makes loud pronouncements about “diversity” but is actually pushing conformity toward a fake reality. The Framers weren’t black, and neither were the Nazis. But who ya gonna believe — Google or your lyin’ eyes?

Maguire cites a particularly glaring example of destructive diversity run amok: “Instead of highly experienced founders and seasoned investors, young people from minority backgrounds were coming in with virtually no investment experience whatsoever. In this time, Ventures promoted a 25-year-old black woman to investment partner — the same position I held at the time — who had not yet made a single investment decision in her entire career.”

That’s what a corporate culture that prioritizes diversity, equity, and inclusion above excellence and sound business decision-making will get you. As The Free Press puts it:

These ex-Googlers, as they’re called, said that they were discouraged from hiring white, male employees; that DEI “is part of every single thing” in the company; and that engineers even had to list the “DEI impact” for the tiniest of software fixes. All of them agreed that the Silicon Valley giant entered the artificial intelligence race with an upper hand but has squandered it by cowing to an activist faction in the company that’s more committed to advancing social justice than making world-class products.

Here, we’re reminded of James Damore, the one-time Google employee whose 10-page missive from 2017 blew the whistle on the company’s diversity initiatives. Revisiting that document, it’s interesting to see how prescient it was. Damore wasn’t against diversity per se. Indeed, just the opposite. But he correctly noted back then that Google’s obsession with diversity had resulted in a host of nakedly discriminatory practices. But rather than listen to Damore and learn from his perspective, Google demonized him. And fired him.

Back in 2015, Google jettisoned its famous “Don’t Be Evil” motto in favor of the far more subjective “Do the right thing.” By that time, its leadership clearly knew that the former directive had become untenable. At least here, we can give the company points for self-awareness.