Google announced Thursday that it will “pause” its Gemini image generator’s ability to create images of people, after the program was criticized for showing misleading images of people's races in historical contexts—leading billionaire Elon Musk to call the service "woke."

Google said Wednesday it was “working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately,” but the company disabled images of people less than 24 hours later, promising an “improved version” of the service soon.

Google has not provided a timeframe for when image generation of people would return, and has not returned a request for comment from Forbes.

Jack Krawczyk, Google’s product director for Gemini Experiences, confirmed in a post on X the chatbot was “offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions,” and said the company was working to “further tune” the service to accurately reflect historical contexts.

Forbes could still use Gemini to create images of inanimate objects such as houses, but could not generate images of people—with the chatbot stating “we expect this feature to return soon and will notify you in release updates when it does.”

BACKGROUND

Google launched Gemini, a chatbot formerly known as Bard and powered by a large language model, on February 8—competing with generative AI programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is backed by rival Microsoft. As part of the new service, Gemini offers an image generator, similar to Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E. However, days after release, users began noticing the generator would create images of “historical” figures and scenes with historical inaccuracies. In some examples created by The Verge, the generator displayed images of black women for the prompt “US senator from the 1800s” (the first black woman to serve in the Senate was Carol Moseley Braun, who was elected in 1992). Another image showed women and black men wearing World War II-era German military uniforms. Google has since acknowledged the misleading images. “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,” Google said in a statement posted on X on Wednesday.

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