Tech

Google’s AI Chatbot Gemini Can’t Answer Global Election Questions

Published

2 months ago

March 13, 2024

Google's AI Chatbot Gemini Can't Answer Global Election Questions

(CTN News) – Using its AI chatbot Gemini, Google said on Tuesday that it will restrict the bot from answering questions about the global elections that are scheduled to take place this year, in order to avoid possible missteps in the adoption of the technology.

As a result of advances in generative AI, including image and video generation, there is now a growing concern among the public that misinformation and fake news are spreading across social media and the government is taking steps to regulate this technology.

In response to the question of how Gemini would respond to the upcoming presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Gemini replied, “I am still learning how to answer this question.”. Google announced restrictions within the U.S. in December, saying they would come into effect before the election. If you are in the meantime, you may try Google search.

According to a spokesperson for Google Gemini Inc. on Tuesday,

The company has restricted the types of election-related queries it will respond to, in preparation for the many elections to take place around the world in 2024, and out of an abundance of caution.

Aside from the United States, several countries will hold national elections in the coming months, such as South Africa and India, one of the largest democracies in the world.

The Indian government has asked tech firms to seek government approval before releasing artificial intelligence tools that are “unreliable” or under trial to the public, and to warn people that AI tools with a high probability of returning wrong answers have to be released.

Late last month, Google paused the image-generation feature of its popular chatbot from generating new images due to a number of inaccuracies in some historical depictions of people created by Gemini.

The company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has said the company is working to resolve these issues and said the chatbot’s responses were “biased” and “completely unacceptable”.

During the run-up to the June European Parliament elections in June, Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms announced last month that it would set up a team to deal with disinformation and the abuse of generative artificial intelligence using data.