It's so stubborn it generated pictures of diverse Nazis, and that's what I saw a liberal rag leading with. In fact it is almost impossible to get a picture of a white person out of it.
* https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/why-...
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/minorities-...
* https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/6/2/why-white-suprem...
* https://www.voanews.com/a/why-some-nonwhite-americans-espous...
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/08/texas-sho...
* https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-20/recall-c...
Makes sense. But it won’t even draw “a picture of a modern German soldier riding a horse”. Are Germans going to be tarnished forever?
FWIW: I’m a black guy not an undercover Nazi sympathizer. But I do want my computer to do what I tell it to do.
Restricting images of war seems kind of silly given the prevalence of hyper-realistic video games that simulate war in gory detail, but it's not related to the reasons for Gemini going wrong.
I think you'll struggle to find people who want this kind of "diversity*. I certainly don't. Getting something representative matters, but it also needs to reflect reality.
Do people want the generated images to be representative, or aspirational?
E.g. let's say you're making something about a population with 5% black people, and you're presenting a group of 8. You could justify making that group entirely white very easily - you've just rounded down, and plenty of groups of 8 within a population like that will be all white (and some will be all black). But you're presenting a narrow slice of an experience of that society, and not including a single black person without reason makes it easy to create an impression of that population as entirely white.
But it also needs to at scale be representative within plausible limits, or it just gets insultingly dumb or even outright racist, just against a different set of people.
On a second thought, maybe for requests like "picture of a crowd cheering signing of the declaration of independence" the exists a big public demand for images that are more diverse than reality was? However, there are many reasons to prefer historical accuracy even here.
But this intransparent heavy-handed approach is just absurd and doesn't look good from any angle.
They ought to try to do something actually decent, but in the absence of that not doing the stupid shit they did would have been better.
What they've done both doesn't promote actual diversity, but also serves to ridicule the very notion of trying to address biases in a good way. They picked the crap attempt at an easy way out, and didn't manage to do even that properly.