Google CEO’s 2016 pledge to combat misinformation with AI under scrutiny following Gemini controversy

After the 2016 election, Google CEO Sundar Pichai pledged that investing in artificial intelligence would be a great opportunity for the tech giant to combat “misinformation.” 

These comments, made during an “all hands” employee meeting in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, have received renewed scrutiny after the blunder of Google’s AI tool, which users flagged for its bias against White people. 

As highlighted by Michael Shellenberger on “Public,” his Substack newsletter, Pichai told employees upset over Trump’s victory: “I think our investments in machine learning and AI is a big opportunity here.” 

He then seemed to suggest that Google was already manipulating search results, per Shellenberger.  

These comments, and the context in which they were made, suggest that the company had been politically motivated years before the rollout of Gemini, Shellenberger has argued. 

“We shouldn’t be surprised that Google has been pushing this, what’s frankly, a racist woke agenda since at least 2017, really 2016, I should say. A few days after the 2016 election,” Shellenberger said. 

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He argued that the problems of Gemini come out of Google’s “hyper-woke culture,” noting that around 90% of employee donations go to Democrats and its former CEO helped Hillary Clinton. 

“It’s a completely Democratic Party-controlled company, and that’s a huge problem because not everybody is a Democrat and you need these search platforms to be politically neutral, not so biased,” Shellenberger said. 

His comments come after Pichai told employees on Tuesday that Google was working to fix Gemini after users on social media flagged that the AI tool was creating inaccurate historical images that sometimes replaced White people with images of Black, Native American, and Asian people. 

“Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts … And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale,” Pichai said. 

Shellenberger told FOX Business he was, to some extent, pleased with the Gemini controversy, because it laid bare Google’s political bias. 

“Google has sort of gotten a pass in its bias and censorship compared to Facebook and Twitter. Folks, including myself, have really not given the scrutiny to Google that it deserves, in part because search results seem sort of natural,” Shellenberger said. “But when you get this AI chatbot Gemini, or you ask it questions, the bias just comes right out.” 

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Reached by FOX Business, Google pointed to a letter by Pichai published on Semafor in which addressed the Gemini controversy. 

“I know that some of its responses have offended our users and show bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong,” Pichai said. 

“Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.”