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AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386
Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465250
You and I may want a totally unfiltered AI tool, but I don't expect a company with billions of users of all ages and situations to release that tool without guardrails.
The Gemeni image model itself is fine. Despite what some people want to believe, it wasn't trained to be anti-white. The problem was some people in high level management position decided they should insert DEI stuff into the prompt without asking or telling the users, and they forced the engineers to implement this without thinking through the obvious consequences, or even performing basic testing.
A competently managed company could still make reasonable efforts to promote DEI (or not), but it would look nothing like the nonsensical images that Gemeni was putting out on launch. Jamming DEI in sideways where it doesn't belong and then having it blow up in their face is a symptom of deeper problems from the top. The DEI is just exacerbating the lack of clarity, which is a much bigger problem.
Fixing Gemeni image generation is easy: just undo the stupid prompt insertions. Fixing the chain of decision-making authority that led to those prompt insertions is difficult. They need to restructure management.
To stop the the prompts being messed with, you have to get rid of a deep set belief system that's grown within Google and culture as a whole at this point. If Google hired a person to start cutting the fat and getting rid of those people, there's gonna be a torrent of lawsuits claiming they're doing discriminatory termination, bad press framing Google as the next Twitter/X, etc.
It would be simple technologically, but it's a cultural issue. Which is hard to control when steering a ship as big as Google. For starters they have to get rid of Sundar and put in someone with an actual opinion on anything other than optimizing to grow the stock at any cost. Which I imagine shareholders aren't interested in!