Last February, the company launched Bard’s successor, Gemini, a chatbot that can generate images and act as a voice-activated digital assistant. Users quickly realized that the system refused to generate images of white people in most cases and drew inaccurate depictions of historical figures.
With each incident, tech industry insiders have criticized the company for dropping the ball. But in interviews, financial analysts said Google must move quickly to keep up with its rivals, even if that means growing pains.
Google “has no choice right now,” Thomas Monteiro, a Google analyst at Investing.com, said in an interview. “Companies need to move very quickly, even if that means skipping a few steps along the way. User experience will just have to catch up.”
Lara Levin, a spokeswoman for Google, said in a statement that the vast majority of AI overview queries result in “high-quality information, with links to dig deeper into the web.” The AI-generated result from the tool is usually displayed at the top of the results page.
“Many of the examples we saw were unusual queries, and we also saw examples that were spoofed or that we couldn’t reproduce,” he added. The company will use “isolated examples” of problematic responses to refine its system.
