Tech billionaire Elon Musk, also the owner of Tesla X, formerly Twitter, has criticised rival Google amidst the ongoing debate surrounding the text-to-image generation feature of its Gemini AI chatbot that led to a backlash. Notably, Google’s Gemini chatbot is facing accusations of being “too woke” due to its creation of historically inaccurate images portraying World War II soldiers and America’s founding fathers.

Taking the matter to X (formerly Twitter), Musk criticised Google, branding the company as “insane” and “anti-civilizational”. He alleged that the Mountain View, California-based company had exceeded its limits with Gemini AI’s image-generation capabilities. The tech billionaire was quoted as saying: “I’m glad that Google overplayed their hand with their AI image generation, as it made their insane racist, anti-civilizational programming clear to all.”

Notably, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced on February 22 that it is temporarily halting the image generation of people by its artificial intelligence (AI) model Gemini and will soon introduce an enhanced version, after several social media users voiced concerns about Gemini AI model generating images of people of colour in historically inaccurate settings.

Debarghya Das, a former Google computer scientist, stated on X, formerly Twitter that “it’s embarrassingly difficult to prompt Google Gemini to recognise the existence of white people.”

For instance, when prompted for images of America’s founding fathers, the results included women and individuals of colour. The tech giant has acknowledged that its tool was “missing the mark”, as reported by BBC.

“Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here,” Jack Krawczyk, Senior Director for Gemini Experiences was quoted as saying in the BBC report.