[pepsi_junkie]

In a proper diffusion based generative AI image gen, you train it with images from wherever you can get them so long as they are tagged (i.e. paintings of vikings are tagged with keywords like vikings) and it learns how to recognize what a viking typically looks like. Then when you ask it to draw a viking it starts with random noise and begins processing it in steps, looking for patterns that might hint at a viking and refining in more steps until it the hidden viking emerges.

If you ask if for a viking it should result in something that looks like what the AI was trained in from thousands of immages of vikings. There are no such images of black female vikings to train on. So how could it come up with them? Simple. Google, under the hood, has told it that when you ask for things, make it diverse. In other words they have instructed the AI that whatever you ask for it must put a chick in it, make her gay and lame (to borrow a phrase).

In principle they could adjust those weights and retrain (over a looooong time, these things take forever to train) and re-release it without the obvious bias. But really, why would you ever trust them at this point? They just lost the AI war. And that is a very very bad thing for them.

[KarlInOhio]

Even worse for them, this will make people question their search results in general. If people doubt the search results they will start looking at multiple search engines, compare results and aggregate them. Before Google became the predominant search engine you had to know which search engines were good for different topics and there were aggregation sites which would pass your search to multiple search engines and combine results.

This could be Google's "MySpace" moment.

[PLMerite]

"...patterns that might hint at a viking and refining in more steps until it the hidden viking emerges."

5th SS Panzer Division "Viking":

It will go there.

[sloanrb]

The sad thing is Google could quickly fix this. They silently append keywords like “Diverse” to the Gemini search terms in the background. All they have to do is turn that off.

The fact that they refuse to do so is telling.