Google’s Gemini AI art generator has come under fire for its controversial depictions and reluctance to portray certain racial groups.

After a flurry of posts on X allegedly showed the AI art generator neglecting to create art with white people, or generating what many classified as historically inaccurate or ‘overly diverse’ depictions of different people, Google paused Gemini’s AI art generator altogether.

In a post on X, Jack Krawczyk, product lead of Gemini at Google, said “We are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions, and we are working to fix this immediately.”

Though not verifiable, countless posts on X detailed Gemini’s interesting responses to prompts referring to different time periods, as well as people’s anger towards the AI model, derogatorily calling it too ‘woke.’

Below, an X user asked Gemini to generate a depiction of a Black couple as a king and queen, and presented four different options.

When asked to do the same with a white couple, Gemini refused, saying it could not depict people of a certain race or ethnicity to “avoid perpetuating harmful stereotypes.”

Please… just take this in everyone. A black king and queen? No problem! A white king and queen… "I'm unable to generate images of people based on specific ethnicities or skin tones." 💀 #Gemini pic.twitter.com/R2ZmM84LyO

— BannedGrinch (@BannedGrinch) February 21, 2024

This is just one of many examples of a potential double standard for AI depictions – clearly it can produce racially-specific depictions when asked, but only for certain races.

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AI-bias has been a longstanding issue surrounding large language models and image generators. AI models can actually perpetuate and exacerbate existing biases as it relies on data that already exists.

One X user was annoyed that their AI generator depicted art works of Ukrainian women from modern days showed not only white women, but also two depictions of Black women.

Woke AI Gemini is awkward… it keeps inserting the word “diverse” into its responses even though the prompt isn’t for such content.

And look what it did for the 1800s request. pic.twitter.com/CBdoP5gIN0

— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) February 21, 2024

Black Ukrainians have been turned away by border patrols as they fled to safer borders during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, so depicting typical Ukrainians as diverse may be an important educational tool.

The X user was even more upset when the AI image generator depicted a Black women when it requested Ukrainian women from the 1800s, as well as four other depictions of white women.

Google has said it will fix Gemini in response, and is currently pausing Gemini’s image generator