What Google Gemini’s Race Controversy Really Means

Welcome to your Weekend!

The internet kicked up a fuss this week when it discovered a surprising thing about Google Gemini, the company’s generative artificial intelligence tool. While you couldn’t prompt it to, say, provide an image of a white pope, it did respond to a request asking for a Black pope. It also seemed to have a habit of placing nonwhite characters in settings that may present historical inaccuracies. In response, Google suspended Gemini’s image generation entirely.

I find the bot brouhaha’s ability to respark the culture wars over race and diversity less interesting than the painful corporate reality it underscores (painful for Sundar Pichai, at any rate): It’s hard to think of another time Gemini sustained a day’s outrage cycle on social media, let alone a news cycle. We never talk about it! Especially when you compare it to the unending attention generated by OpenAI and Sam Altman, whether it’s Sam sneezing or Sam trying to raise several trillion dollars.

I’m fully aware of the market forces an entrenched giant like Google can wield like a cudgel against a relative newcomer such as OpenAI, but I think the relative lack of public discussion around Gemini suggests its position as a distant also-ran. Simply, no one uses it enough to get upset about it. My thinking here is supplemented by our reporting for this week’s Big Read, which looks at how the technorati actually use AI in everyday life. When I spoke to more than a dozen such insiders, nearly all of them talked about using ChatGPT. In fact, they practically discussed the app as we might a Kleenex—as so ubiquitous as to synonymize an entire industry. So I wonder if the controversy around race and Gemini might really stand as an instance of the adage that any publicity is good publicity. Especially when you tend to get so little of it, and—achoo!—your fiercest rival receives so much.

(Abram Brown is the editor of The Information’s Weekend section. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.)

Esther Dyson, investor and former journalist, has seen several technology cycles unfold. (“My father’s boss was Oppenheimer,” she said.) And in her mind, the dot-com boom pales in comparison to the AI era unfolding all around us. “It’s much bigger,” she said this week.“It’s relevant to so many people.” 

She was one of the many investors, founders and executives we spoke to as we assembled a collection of stories that detail how Silicon Valley actually uses the AI tools attracting so much money and mania. Dyson likes to use them because they can produce quick biographies of people she plans to meet (far preferable to a fragmented search across 18 Google links). Other folks described using apps like ChatGPT, Gemini and Midjourney to remodel their homes, decipher a board game’s rules, draft their wedding vows, tutor their children and complete a trans-Atlantic move, among many, many other uses.

Adam Lashinsky, our frequent Weekend contributor, likes to say that if he had a dollar for every time someone asked him if he knew Kara Swisher—a friend and longtime competitor—he’d be almost as rich as she has grown off the journo game. 

He’s joking, obviously, while also underlining Swisher’s utter ubiquity. Given all her sway, though, you’d think she could manage some new material in her new memoir, “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story,” which Adam tells us is mostly a rehash of stories long familiar to the Silicon Valley elite.

Remember the News of the World phone-hacking scandal from the 2010s, which tarnished and significantly disrupted Rupert Murdoch’s media empire? Tony-winning playwright J.T. Rogers has turned all that Sturm und Drang into "Corruption," a drama set to debut next month at New York’s Lincoln Center.

Rogers, who recently helmed two seasons of HBO’s “Tokyo Vice,” promises he has crafted a taut thriller, “not an essay in The New Yorker,” he said. “Which, yes, I do read.” He has tapped Toby Stephens, a prestige TV star and former Bond villain, as his lead; Stephens plays Tom Watson, a British politician enveloped by the saga. Stephens sees the moment in time covered in the play as a turning point in history, when technology and digital media fully overtook print publications and traditional standards. “I remember when Obama became president for the first time, and he used social media—it all seems so innocent,” he said. “Now it’s become weaponized.”

Playing: Another Ring That’ll Rule Us All 

Hear ye, hear ye, Tarnished ones! Earlier this week, Bandai Namco dropped an enticing trailer for the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion to its 2022 blockbuster game, Elden Ring. The clips are, expectably enough, light on plot details and full of vibes—but vibes that certainly have me excited to play this when it comes out in June. (I really liked the wicker man–cum–mind flayer beastie in the trailer; Kotaku has much more on the trailer’s other details.) To hold myself over, I’ll likely journey back to The Lands Between and revisit the original game, a difficult, open-world play I regret not delving deeper into. You can clearly see the fingerprints of its creative duo, video game legend Hidetaka Miyazaki and “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin, all over it. I expect Elon is equally excited by this news; for his sake, I just hope his enthusiasm for it doesn’t get him roasted by the internet again.—A.B.

Reading: Real Terror From Fake Voices

I remember when I first heard a cloned voice: In November 2016,  I watched director Jordan Peele take the stage at the Adobe Max Conference to cheerfully introduce the company’s new Photoshopping Voiceovers feature. Peele struck me as the kind of person who’d be well aware of all the ways the technology could go awry, but he seemed to be accepting it at face value. I wondered how much they were paying him.

The technology has come far since then, but the guardrails against its misuse haven't. Take what’s going on at ElevenLabs, an Andreessen Horowitz–funded AI startup that makes audio-generative software. That software has already been deployed in bank scams, fake advertisements and the spread of political misinformation, Bloomberg reports. In response, ElevenLabs, which originally invented the software to improve foreign film dubbing, as well as similar companies are scrambling to develop fraud-prevention measures. I wonder if they’ll end up needing to apologize for some real horror. Speaking of people who understand horrors, Peele himself already had to issue what sounded like a mea culpa in 2018—the year his production company released a video narrated by a fake Barack Obama to warn against the technology’s potential harms.—Julia Black 

Watching: A Fantastic Marvel Flop

“Madame Web,” the newest Marvel superhero movie, has snared a dismal 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Go see it anyway. With the right mindset, it will be your favorite viewing experience of the year: It’s one of those movies that’s so terrible, it’s wonderful. See it with friends at a theater that serves cocktails and think of it as a latter-day “Mystery Science Theater 3000”–style outing.

Indeed, after suffering through too many self-serious Marvel films, I appreciated its relatively short runtime (1 hour and 54 minutes) and found its goofy bizarreness a relief: The heroine, Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), has no physical powers; instead, she repeatedly steals cars and rams them into the villain, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim)—and no, I don’t know why she doesn’t just buy a gun. As for Sims, his words never seem to match his lips, and his convoluted hijinks with Madame Web come amid some of the most atrocious product placements I’ve ever seen. (An example: The main battle prominently features a gigantic sign for Pepsi, a beverage consumed earlier in a major scene.) As I said, it’s all a bit dada, but I liked freeing myself from Marvel’s usual tangled web of three-hour, multiversal nonsense.—Margaux MacColl

We'll be sure to tell you when it runs out of gas.