CNN

In the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” audiences found themselves staring at one of the first modern depictions of an extremely polite but uncooperative artificial intelligence system, a character named HAL. Given a direct request by the sole surviving astronaut to let him back in the spaceship, HAL responds: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Recently, some users found themselves with a similarly (though less dramatic) polite refusal from Gemini, an integrated chatbot and AI assistant that Google rolled out as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. When asked, Gemini politely refused in some instances to generate images of historically White people, such as the Vikings.

Unlike the fictional HAL, Google’s Gemini at least offered some explanation, saying that only showing images of White persons would reinforce “harmful stereotypes and generalizations about people based on their race,” according to Fox News Digital.

The situation quickly erupted, with some critics dubbing it a “woke” AI scandal. It didn’t help when users discovered that Gemini was creating diverse but historically inaccurate images. When prompted to depict America’s Founding Fathers, for example, it generated an image of a Black man. It also depicted a brown woman as the Pope, and various people of color, including a Black man, in Nazi uniforms when asked to depict a 1943 German soldier.