Jim Jordan Promises Investigation Into Google AI's 'Black George Washington' Amid 'Woke' Controversy

Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, demanded on Saturday in a letter to Alphabet, the parent business of Google, that the firm discloses any potential impact the Biden administration may have had on its contentious Gemini AI program. As reported by Mediate, when Gemini began producing 'historically inaccurate' pictures of Black Vikings, Native American founding fathers, and female popes using prompts, all for the sake of diversity, it became controversial.

Jordan tweeted the letter on Saturday. It was referred to Daniel F. Donovan, a Washington-based lawyer representing Alphabet and a specialist in congressional investigations at the King & Spalding law firm. The tweet read, "@Jim_Jordan Demands Information on the Biden Administration’s Role in Google’s 'Woke' Gemini AI The Committee is investigating how and to what extent the Executive Branch has colluded with Big Tech and other intermediaries to censor Americans' speech." Gemini has been under fire for depicting historical figures such as George Washington incorrectly portrayed as Black and a Black lady dressed as the pope prompted by a search for the pope.

Jordan and other Republicans in the chamber are upset with Google's artificial intelligence program Gemini because it hasn't been able to accurately portray white people, according to The New York Post. They want to get any correspondence between Biden's White House and Gemini by March 17 via a subpoena submitted to Alphabet. As reported by Forbes, the parent business Alphabet's stock had a $90 billion selloff after the Gemini collapse, mostly due to anger from the right about the AI model's inaccuracy. Particularly harsh was the criticism leveled by well-known tech blogger Ben Thompson of Stratechery, who demanded that CEO Sundar Pichai go down due to the corrupt culture shown by Gemini's absurd performance problems.

In a recent video recorded at San Francisco's AGI House, co-founder Sergey Brin said that AI models are still being developed, and Google's Gemini is no different. He confessed in a recent video, "We definitely messed up on the image generation and I think it was mostly due to not thorough testing and it definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people." Brin said during his speech that he "kind of came out of retirement just because the trajectory of AI is so exciting," but he emphasized that there is still a lot of work to be done.

Although it is not deliberate, he stressed that the corporation is still unsure of why its AI model 'leans left in many cases.' Gemini's fault was severe, Brin pointed out that similar things may easily go wrong with other models. He further added, "If you deeply test any text model out there, whether it’s ours, ChatGPT, Grok, what have you, it’ll say some pretty weird things that are out there that you know definitely feel far left, for example." Brin also acknowledged that political issues often arise when criticizing AI. He made the point that while AI models need to refrain from disseminating false information, everyone has a different idea of what constitutes disinformation. He continued, "There’s a lot of complicated political issues in terms of what different people consider misinformation versus not."