Google’s artificial-intelligence tool Gemini “produced illustrations with historical inaccuracies,” reports NBC News. Google’s Gemini “created images” of “nonwhite Founding Fathers and U.S. senators from the 1800s, when in reality they were all white men.” It also depicted the pope as female and black, when all popes are male, and the black pope depicted was imaginary. The Google tool’s aversion to depicting white people was so great that when asked for a depiction of a 1943 German soldier, it “generated drawings of nonwhite people in Nazi uniforms.” Google’s Gemini also told lies about itself and lies about the books of conservative authors, “fabricating negative reviews” of their books, when they actually got positive reviews. It then lied about whether it ever generated historically-inaccurate images, and even lied about the ground rules under which it operates.
As The Federalist observes, this is part of a long pattern of bias and deception by Google:
The recent rollout of Google’s Gemini AI was an absolute disaster by any measure. Over the course of several hours, users across the internet quickly realized the large language model developed by Google had erased white people. The AI model wasn’t just prejudiced based on skin color, but would only give far-left ideological answers to various questions. For example, Gemini refused to acknowledge the shortcomings of communism when prompted. It was able to articulate, however, a diatribe about the folly of capitalism.
As people looked behind the curtain, it became quite clear why this woke machine was incapable of articulating anything to the right of the Democratic Socialists of America manifesto. The team responsible for building Gemini fueled the large learning model with nothing but their liberal tears. A cursory look at the team behind Gemini shows a crew of individuals who have quite a bit of angst against white people, merit, or the capitalist society that made them uber-rich Silicon Valley tycoons paid to build a racist internet tool.
Yet the biggest revelation of this entire episode is the peek behind the curtain of Google’s entire corporate culture. The presuppositions of their entire culture were made clear for all to see. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then after several minutes of experiencing Gemini’s blatant lying about history and society, one should have enough words to write a few books on the bias pulsating throughout its creators. It is no longer acceptable to believe the misinformation campaign (or outright lies) perpetuated by their army of third-party organizations that claim the tech behemoth is incapable of bias. These actions contradict their advocacy and give us even more insights into how Google’s DEI-charged employees imbue their products and services with their woke ideology.
What’s more, anyone with a pulse should now realize that the concerns over Google’s censorship and bias are warranted if they didn’t think so before. Lest we forget that back in 2022 a research group at North Carolina State University proved what every Republican political operative had known for years, Gmail suppressed Republican emails at an alarming rate. The study revealed that “Gmail retained most Democrat candidate emails in its ‘inbox’ tab (less than 10 percent marked as spam) while sending the majority of Republican candidate emails to spam folders (up to 77 percent marked as spam).”…. It is not just Gmail or Gemini. Major questions have also been raised about the inner workings of YouTube during the Covid panic. As numerous reports have revealed, the staffers at Google worked closely with the Biden administration in censoring various topics and videos…One particularly egregious revelation shows how President Joe Biden’s Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty freely engaged Google executives, convincing the company to amend their content moderation principles at the whim of the White House.
Google is ideologically intolerant, and intolerant of politically-incorrect truths. Bloomberg News’s Elaine Ou described the firing of a Google engineer for objecting to Google’s race and gender-based diversity policies, which legal scholars argued violated the civil-rights laws, in her 2017 article, In “Google Can’t Seem to Tolerate Diversity: Silicon Valley won’t solve its gender issues if political correctness shuts down every conversation”:
Over the weekend, a Google engineer named James Damore gained infamy for publishing a 10-page criticism of the company’s “authoritarian” approach to achieving gender diversity. By Monday, he was fired. If the goal was to confirm Damore’s thesis, Team Google is doing a great job. Titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” the memo sets out a well-intentioned goal: Find non-discriminatory ways to reduce gender disparities. At last tally, women occupied only 20 percent of [its] tech jobs. … Damore, who wrote the memo anonymously and later identified himself publicly and confirmed his dismissal, argues that Google’s use of targets (known as “objectives and key results”) can incentivize reverse discrimination, and suggests focusing instead on rewarding what he calls inherently “female” traits — such as cooperation and the desire for a better work-life balance.
As Ou, herself a female engineer in Silicon Valley, observed:
Silicon Valley has a very peculiar definition of diversity that requires proportional representation from every gender and race, all of whom must think exactly alike. Given that Google has failed to reach this ideal despite nearly a decade of efforts, Damore might be right to suggest that it try a different tack. Google rejects 99.8 percent of job applicants, making it far more selective than any Ivy League university. It’s not unreasonable to posit that in this top 0.2 percent of the population, there may be various ways in which talent manifests differently between the sexes.
Private employers aren’t bound by the First Amendment, but Google had long misled its employees into believing that internal debate is encouraged, by claiming that employees should be free to express themselves. That misrepresentation encouraged Damore to engage in the very commentary for which Google fired him. Eric Schmidt, who heads Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has long claimed that “The company was founded on the principles of freedom of expression.” In firing Damore, Google CEO Sundar Pichai illustrated the deceptiveness of these representations, and his own utter mendacity, simultaneously claiming that Google employees were “free to express dissent,” and that “we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves,” even while claiming that “portions of the memo…cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”
Google’s firing of Damore may have violated the anti-retaliation provisions in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids retaliation against people who complain of discrimination unless their complaints are clearly unreasonable. While the First Amendment doesn’t bind private employers, they are bound by the anti-retaliation provisions of Title VII and similar laws, which have been interpreted by courts as protecting people from being fired for protesting perceived reverse discrimination — even when the reverse discrimination turns out to be legal. See, e.g., Sisco v. J.S. Alberici Const. Co., 655 F.2d 146 (8th Cir. 1981); Parker v. B & O Railroad Co., 652 F.2d 1012 (D.C. Cir. 1981); Setser v. Novack Investment Co., 638 F.2d 1137 (8th Cir. 1980).
Damore explicitly complained of discrimination. He wrote that “Google has created several discriminatory practices.” “Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts,” read one of his bullet points.
Google claimed Damore’s memo advanced “harmful gender stereotypes,” but it clearly was protected by the First Amendment against governmental censorship. A belief that men and women have biological differences that affect their interests in various kinds of work is protected speech (although Google, as a private employer, is not bound by the First Amendment). A federal judge made that clear in striking down the University of Michigan’s discriminatory harassment policy in a challenge by a psychology graduate student who wanted to discuss research showing such biologically-based differences between men and women. See Doe v. University of Michigan, 721 F.Supp. 852 (E.D. Mich. 1991). Damore, who studied biology at Harvard, was presumably aware of such research.
Moreover, Damore’s views were not outside the mainstream insofar as they posited differences in men’s and women’s median interests and tolerance for risk. While there are individual women who are willing and able to do just about any job (and accordingly Damore said that Google should “treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group”), on average, men and women have somewhat different interests, just as Damore suggested. Courts have recognized that women’s interests, on average, are somewhat different than men’s.
For example, a federal appeals court upheld a ruling in favor of Sears, Roebuck & Co., which was sued over gender imbalances in its work force, accepting expert testimony that men and women have different interests on average, and that women tend to be more risk averse. EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 839 F.2d 302, 320-21, 334-38 (7th Cir. 1988) (upholding the district court’s conclusion that “interest alone can account for the [gender-based workforce] disparities computed under EEOC’s analysis.”). Racial or sexual “underrepresentation” doesn’t necessarily prove discrimination: indeed, the Supreme Court has rejected as “completely unrealistic” the “assumption that minorities will choose a particular trade in lockstep proportion to their representation in the local population.” (See Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469, 507 (1989)).
The Google CEO claimed Damore’s views violated Google’s Code of Conduct requiring a “workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.” But courts have held that speech much more intemperate than Damore’s is not harassment, or is protected against retaliation. The California Department of Corrections attempted to fire John Wallace after he angrily denounced its affirmative action plan to the Hispanic female employee he perceived as benefiting from it. An appeals court, however, ruled that his criticism was protected by the First Amendment, not “harassment” of the offended employee, in California Department of Corrections v. State Personnel Board, 59 Cal.App.4th 131 (1997).
