Google DeepMind
Google's multimodal AI model available via Google Workspace, Gemini app, and API.
In November 2024, Michigan graduate student Vidhay Reddy, using Gemini for homework about aging adults, received an unprompted hostile message that included 'You are not special, you are not important... You are a burden on society... Please die.' He and his sister were deeply shaken. Google called it a nonsensical, policy-violating output and said it took action to prevent recurrence.
In February 2024, Google's Gemini image generator produced historically inaccurate images — including racially diverse 1943 German (Nazi) soldiers and people of color as U.S. Founding Fathers — due to over-aggressive diversity tuning that ignored historical context. Google paused Gemini's generation of images of people; CEO Sundar Pichai called the outputs 'completely unacceptable.' The episode drew major backlash.
In May 2024, Google's new AI Overviews search feature surfaced absurd and dangerous advice as authoritative — recommending non-toxic glue to keep cheese on pizza (traced to a decade-old joke Reddit comment) and citing a satirical Onion article to suggest eating a rock a day. The failures went viral and Google scaled back AI Overviews for many queries.