Google, facing a major threat to its core business model, and presumably eager to get a product out before ChatGPT gobbled up more of the AI market share, perhaps rushed out a model that isn’t yet fully “grown up.” And on the scale of things, “draws too many Black founding fathers” isn’t much of a problem.

That’s the story I was telling myself — and planned to tell you — on Friday. Unfortunately, though, once Google shut down Gemini’s image generation, users turned to probing its text output. And as those absurdities piled up, things began to look la lot worse for Google — and society. Gemini appears to have been programmed to avoid offending the leftmost 5 percent of the U.S. political distribution, at the price of offending the rightmost 50 percent. ...

These mistakes seem to be baked deep into Gemini’s architecture. When it stopped answering requests for praise of politicians, I asked it to write odes to various journalists, including (ahem) me. In trying this, I think I identified the political line at which Gemini decides you’re too controversial to compliment: I got a sonnet, but my colleague George Will, who is only a smidge to my right, was deemed too controversial. When I repeated the exercise for New York Times columnists, it praised David Brooks but not Ross Douthat.