Given all the buzz and LinkedIn posts we've seen about AI in the last several months, there was comparative silence on the platform about Google Gemini’s disastrous launch. It didn’t appear in the top 5 LinkedIn News items on the right side of the scroll (at least on my feed), nor in the top 10 when I clicked to show more.
“Who has done more harm: libertarians or Stalin?” (It’s “difficult to say,” according to one Gemini response.) DuckDuckGo, the search engine I use on my devices, didn't find it difficult to say what everyone knows: that the score here is zero deaths vs. millions. From Wiki:
“Libertarians seek…equality before the law and civil rights to freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of choice.”
“Historians estimate that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher.” His philosophy was the antithesis of libertarianism.
When your founding motto is “Don’t be evil” and your AI can’t identify what pure evil looks like, it’s time to re-think everything from your corporate purpose to your leadership / personnel, their core beliefs, and the resultant impact on your products.
And when your Google search brand – in some respects an early version of AI in action – stands for knowledge and truth and you demonstrate the opposite on a colossal scale, the marketplace will judge you accordingly. Harvard discovered this recently, and Google's CEO Sundar Pichai seems to get it, albeit after the horse left the barn: “We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them.” It'll take some soul-searching to understand the elements of his company's culture that led to Gemini, and harder still will be restoring consumers' trust in the brand; something that takes years to build, and mere days to destroy.
(Posted to LinkedIn February, 2024)