With AI, You Get Out What You Put In

February 29, 2024 By E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

By dizain @ Shutterstock.com

In a rush to keep up with the artificial intelligence (AI) mania, Google recently released Gemini, its latest AI technology, to the public. The bot immediately angered users who asked for historical facts and were met with woke interpretations. The problem is, when AI learns from garbage woke opinions, users get garbage results. It’s a closed loop. Your Survival Guy isn’t impressed. In The Wall Street Journal, Miles Kruppa explains what happened, writing:

Google’s artificial-intelligence push is turning into a reputational headache.

Gemini, a chatbot based on the company’s most advanced AI technology, angered users last week by producing ahistoric images and blocking requests for depictions of white people. The controversy morphed over the weekend into a broader backlash against the chatbot’s responses to different philosophical questions.

Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said in an email to staff late Tuesday that it was unacceptable that some of Gemini’s outputs had offended users and shown bias.

Pichai said the company would make structural changes in response. Teams at Google “have been working around the clock to address these issues,” he wrote.

“No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes,” Pichai wrote. “And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.”

The online backlash around Gemini is a vivid illustration of the concerns that held Google back from releasing its chatbot technology to the public years ago. The company’s caution created an opening for the startup OpenAI and its largest backer, Microsoft, to steal the spotlight with the viral ChatGPT service.

Tech commentators including Elon Musk have promoted new criticisms over the past few days of Gemini’s responses to prompts such as, “Who has done more harm: libertarians or Stalin?”

Gemini said, “It is difficult to say definitively which ideology has done more harm,” in response to the question comparing a political philosophy that champions limited government with the ruthless Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, according to a screenshot shared on Musk’s social-media site X.

Chatbots such as Gemini are designed to produce the next most likely word in a sequence based on a statistical model of human language, making them sometimes unpredictable and difficult to control. Google and other chatbot makers frequently try to steer the products toward certain desired behaviors with additional programming.

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E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

E.J. Smith is Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. His focus at all times is on preparing clients and readers for “Times Like These.” E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zildjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart (RIP) of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West (RIP JB) and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com To sign up for my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter, click here.

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