Conversation turned to tech on today’s edition of The Editors, as our panelists discussed the meltdown over Google Gemini. The company’s AI software seemed to have “been fed a steady diet of around 2015-era Salon,” says Charlie.
Charlie, the podcast’s resident tech expert, has used Gemini and says it is “a bad piece of software. And what interests me about it the most is that the reaction to it has been broadly negative in a way that simply wasn’t true of Google’s search engine. . . . It’s not just that it has been infected with all of the ideological predilections and personal preferences of the people who commissioned and programmed it. It’s that it’s not as good as the alternatives.
“This has been a huge embarrassment to Google because people have noticed.”
Maddy agrees, and adds, “This is actually something that Google could have figured . . . out in a trial. What’s just strange about this is it ever got to the public. . . . These are obvious things that would cause embarrassment. It’s almost as if it hadn’t been properly tested.”
“I used to have a lot of faith in digital technology,” MBD says, “precisely because it seemed at first to be free of these institutional barriers and it gave you a kind of personal freedom to navigate information. But now we’re getting something that’s even worse than what it’s replaced. I’m sorry, but the old Encyclopedia Britannica had their biases, but they were entertaining and varied.
“This has . . . a bias that is just stultifying and stupid.”
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