Sen. Tom Cotton torches Google AI system as ‘racist, preposterously woke, Hamas-sympathizing’

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., slammed Google’s AI chatbot Gemini as “preposterously woke” on Friday for its refusal to produce any images of White people. 

The company paused the chatbot’s image generation on Thursday after social media users pointed out that the system was creating inaccurate historical images that sometimes replaced White people, like the Founding Fathers, with images of Black, Native American and Asian people.

“Google deserves condemnation for creating a racist, preposterously woke, Hamas-sympathizing AI system,” Cotton said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter. “Republican lawmakers will remember this the next time Google comes asking for antitrust help.”

Cotton pointed out that “the problem also lies at the White House,” which pushed an executive order last year that bolsters “AI safety and security, protects Americans’ privacy, advances equity and civil rights,” according to an October Biden-Harris fact sheet.

“This debacle is a good reminder of why federal control over AI would be a disaster,” Cotton continued. “It would force every AI system to be as broken and as dishonest as Google’s.”

GOOGLE TO PAUSE GEMINI IMAGE GENERATION AFTER AI REFUSES TO SHOW IMAGES OF WHITE PEOPLE

On Wednesday, Google apologized for the errors. 

“We’re aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions,” Google said on Wednesday.

Gemini, formerly known as Google Bard, is one of many multimodal large language models (LLMs) currently available to the public. As is the case with all LLMs, the human-like responses offered by these AIs can change from user to user. Based on contextual information, the language and tone of the prompter, and training data used to create the AI responses, each answer can be different, even if the question is the same.

GOOGLE APOLOGIZES AFTER NEW GEMINI AI REFUSES TO SHOW PICTURES, ACHIEVEMENTS OF WHITE PEOPLE

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Gemini Experiences Senior Director of Product Management Jack Krawczyk addressed the responses from the AI that had led social media users to voice concern.

“We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately,” Krawczyk said. “Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing, because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here.”

Prior to Krawczyk’s tenure with Google, he allegedly tweeted that “white privilege is f—king real” and America is rampant with “egregious racism,” according to posts circulating on X that appear to be his. 

“White privilege is f—king real,” Krawczyk allegedly wrote in a tweet on April 13, 2018, according to screenshots on X. “Don’t be an a—hole and act guilty about it – do your part in recognizing bias at all levels of egregious.”

One alleged post, which Elon Musk also shared a picture of, referenced President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. 

“I’ve been crying in intermittent bursts for the past 24 hours since casting my ballot. Filling in that Biden/Harris line felt cathartic,” the Google director allegedly wrote. 

FOX Business’ Nikolas Lanum, Chris Pandolfo and Reuters contributed to this report. 

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