In what can only be described as a surreal fever dream of automation, Google’s latest AI experiment, Gemini, recently showcased its image generation powers by confidently producing uncanny artwork where former President Barack Obama morphed into a strange hybrid of Michael Jordan and various stock photo extras who had wandered in from a software demo in 2010.
Gemini, Google’s response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, has been under close public scrutiny in recent weeks thanks to a series of decisions that oscillate somewhere between questionable judgment and outright historical revisionism. While the tool was designed, presumably, to be “inclusive”, it appears to have taken that brief with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to historical nuance, famously generating outputs of Nazi-era Germans depicted as people of color and now giving Barack Obama an athletic makeover that seems more Space Jam than Oval Office.
Numerous users attempting to generate images of the former president were shown AI depictions that looked vaguely like if you asked a robot from the future to describe Obama based solely on having once watched a basketball game in the 1990s. Some portrayals had him with exaggerated features and stylings that one might generously describe as “imaginative” and perhaps less generously as “Google forgot what Black people actually look like.”
“The AI-generated Obama looked like he was about to announce the starting five for the Chicago Bulls,” commented one user on social media, summing up the general bewilderment.
Google has since pulled Gemini’s image generation capabilities offline, stating diplomatically that it was doing so to address feedback and improve accuracy, though one suspects a small team of engineers is now having the world’s most awkward lesson in American history and optics.
The whole episode serves as a cautionary tale about what happens when algorithms designed to be politically correct decide to go rogue and start rewriting reality one pixel at a time. After all, inclusivity is important but so is remembering that Barack Obama did in fact exist, and was not played by a rotating cast of AI-generated CGI extras auditioning for a Nike commercial.
Turns out even cutting-edge AI sometimes mixes up the White House and the hardwood.