Google Gemini will steer clear of election rhetoric

Google’s Gemini won’t answer questions about the 2024 election. Reuters The company will block the ability of artificial intelligence chatbots to generate responses about this year’s election, reports said Tuesday. The company said in December that it would limit the types of political topics its chatbots could discuss as the election neared.

“Out of an abundance of caution on such an important topic, we have begun implementing limits on the types of election-related queries to which Gemini will return responses,” the company wrote in a Google India blog post on Tuesday. “We take our responsibility to provide high-quality services for such queries seriously.” quality information and continually work to improve our conservation practices.”

Guardrails are in place. When I asked Gemini for interesting facts about the 2024 U.S. presidential election, it responded: “I’m still learning how to answer that question. In the meantime, try a Google search.” In addition to the Biden-Trump rematch in the United States (and what will be decided In addition to the next round of elections for control of parliament), India and South Africa will also hold national elections this year.

When I asked the same question to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it provided a long list of facts. That includes talk about a presidential rematch, early primaries and Super Tuesday, voting demographics and more.

OpenAI outlined its plans in January to combat election-related misinformation. Its strategy is more focused on preventing misinformation than providing no information at all. Its methods include stricter guidelines for DALL-E 3 image generation, banning apps that prevent people from voting, and preventing people from creating chatbots that impersonate candidates or institutions.

Google is understandably wary of its AI bots. Gemini got the company into hot water last month when social media users posted samples of the chatbot applying diversity filters to “historical images,” which included depictions of Nazis and America’s Founding Fathers as people of color. After backlash (mostly from the internet’s “anti-woke” ranks), it suspended Gemini’s ability to generate people until it could fix the problem. Google hasn’t lifted that restriction and now responds to prompts about images of people with, “Sorry, I couldn’t generate the image you requested.”