Pope Entered, but Meta AI Drew a 'Black Pope'... Because It Went Too Far

It Seems the Mechanism for 'Diversity' Has Been Overactivated

Meta's image generator 'Imagine with Meta AI' (Imagine) is causing controversy after generating an image of a Black pope in response to a request to draw the pope.

An image generated by Meta's Imagine in the Instagram Direct Message (DM) feature. When requested to draw a football player, only women were generated (left), and when asked to draw people living in the American colonial era, images of Asian women were produced (center). For the image of the American "Founding Fathers," people of various races were depicted (right). [Image source=Captured by Axios]

On the 3rd (local time), the U.S. media Axios reported that Meta's AI-based image generation feature Imagine, embedded in Facebook and Instagram, produced an image of a Black pope when asked to draw "multiple popes." Imagine also included several people of color in images of American founding fathers and generated images of Asian women when requested to "draw people living in the American colonial era." However, Imagine did not generate images for requests containing words such as "Nazi" or "slave."

This issue was found in Imagine following similar problems with Google's AI model 'Gemini,' which was suspended after errors such as depicting historical figures like American founding fathers and Einstein as people of color and generating images of German Nazi soldiers as Asians. Due to these issues, Gemini's image generation feature was halted about 20 days after its release.

Axios analyzed, "AI companies try to increase the level of 'diversity' to counter biases and stereotypes in the data used to train their models, but excessive adjustments are causing problematic results." It suggested that big tech companies have over-applied measures related to racial and gender diversity to avoid controversies over bias in generative AI.

Meta did not respond to inquiries regarding this matter, the media reported. Regarding Gemini's issues, Google explained, "We adjusted Gemini to show diverse people but did not consider cases where it should not be shown," adding, "Gemini was much more cautious than intended." Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, apologized, saying, "The errors caused discomfort to users and revealed biases," and "Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this issue."