Given the degree of the controversy, I think even if it was just simple fixes in system prompts, they would want to take a few weeks of testing and red teaming before re-releasing.
One wonders why they haven't done this kind of testing before going public with such an important feature of such an important new flagship product. It's not like the prompts were some super niche stuff that required a lot of imagination to conjure.
And they could have blocked the people image generation feature from the start if they saw it malfunctioning like that in tests and didn't have enough time to fix it on such a short notice before launch.
I find it hard to believe nobody internal at Google bothered to play with Gemini to generate people for shits and giggles and saw the hilarious wrong outputs and raise the alarm.
Or they did ran tests, saw the issues but they decided internally that there's nothing wrong with those generated outputs, which is even worse.
Either way, whichever reason it was, why would you use or even want to pay for a Google product if this is the level of QC and broken functionality you can expect from Google products?
To further my point. I use ChatGPT to translate stuff from English to German a lot and now I used it to write a legal complaint in German and I tried getting Gemini to translate it as well to compare it to ChatGPT, and instead of doing that, it just said it won't do it because it can't offer legal advice. FFS, I didn't ask you for legal advice, I already did my research on that topic, I just asked you to translate verbatim from English to German.
Gemini's "safety" guardrails make it beyond useless at this point that I wouldn't even use it even for free. How does Google plant to make money from it? Or is it gonna be another side-project they'll cancel in 2-5 years.
The alarm was drowned out by the "Shit OpenAI is miles ahead in this game, we need to launch ASAP to try to close the gap" alarm.