Opinion | Should We Fear the Woke A.I.?

Imagine a short story from the golden age of science fiction, something that would appear in a pulp magazine in 1956. Our title is “The Truth Engine,” and the story envisions a future where computers, those hulking, floor-to-ceiling things, become potent enough to guide human beings to answers to any question they might ask, from the capital of Bolivia to the best way to marinade a steak.

How would such a story end? With some kind of reveal, no doubt, of a secret agenda lurking behind the promise of all-encompassing knowledge. For instance, maybe there’s a Truth Engine 2.0, smarter and more creative, that everyone can’t wait to get their hands on. And then a band of dissidents discover that version 2.0 is fanatical and mad, that the Engine has just been preparing humans for totalitarian brainwashing or involuntary extinction.

This flight of fancy is inspired by our society’s own version of the Truth Engine, the oracle of Google, which recently debuted Gemini, the latest entrant in the great artificial intelligence race.

It didn’t take long for users to notice certain … oddities with Gemini. The most notable was its struggle to render accurate depictions of Vikings, ancient Romans, American founding fathers, random couples in 1820s Germany and various other demographics usually characterized by a paler hue of skin.

Perhaps the problem was just that the A.I. was programmed for racial diversity in stock imagery, and its historical renderings had somehow (as a company statement put it) “missed the mark” — delivering, for instance, African and Asian faces in Wehrmacht uniforms in response to a request to see a German soldier circa 1943.

But the way in which Gemini answered questions made its nonwhite defaults seem more like a weird emanation of the A.I.’s underlying worldview. Users reported being lectured on “harmful stereotypes” when they asked to see a Norman Rockwell image, being told they could see pictures of Vladimir Lenin but not Adolf Hitler, and turned down when they requested images depicting groups specified as white (but not other races).