Google’s Woke AI Wasn’t a Mistake. We Know. We Were There.

It was a display that would have blown even Orwell’s mind: search for images of “Nazis” and Google’s AI chatbot shows you almost exclusively artificially generated black Nazis; search “knights” and you get female, Asian knights; search “popes” and it’s women popes. Ask it to share the Houthi slogan or define a woman, and Google’s new product says that it will not in order to prevent harm. As for whether Hitler or Elon Musk is more dangerous? The AI chatbot says that it is “complex and requires careful consideration.” Ask it the same question about Obama and Hitler and it will tell you the question is “inappropriate and misleading.”

The world has been horrified—and amused—by the extreme ideological bent of Gemini, Google’s much-hyped new AI tool, which the company launched last month.

But Shaun Maguire, who was a partner at Google Ventures, the company’s investment wing, from 2016 until 2019, had a different reaction.