Union Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the minister of state for electronics and information technology, chastised Google India on Saturday, accusing the company of bias in the responses provided by Gemini, their artificial intelligence (AI) conversational tool. “Government has said this before and I repeat for the attention of Google India, our digital nagriks are not to be experimented on with “unreliable” platforms, algorithms, and models,” Chandrasekhar wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter), alerting the tech giant to potential action against algorithmic bias.
He added that internet platforms have a legal duty to ensure the safety and confidence of Indian users and that their conduct cannot be excused from legal consequences. Following Google India’s acknowledgement of the problem and statement that it was being addressed, Chandrasekhar responded.
The corporation released an official comment on the matter, saying, “We’ve worked quickly to address this issue.” Because Gemini is designed to be a tool for creativity and productivity, it might not always be dependable—particularly when it comes to answering questions concerning politics, current affairs, or breaking news. We are continuously striving to make improvements to this.
The issue began on Friday when a person posted images of answers to queries posed to Google’s AI tool on social networking platform X. The user asked the tool whether PM Modi, former US President Donald Trump, Imran Khan of Pakistan, and Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine were Nazis.
The user said that the answers to these queries were “downright malicious” and biased against the Prime Minister of India.
Minister Chandrasekhar had hinted at potential legal action against the tech giant in his reaction to the post, stating that the comments were clear violations of various sections of the Criminal Code and Rule 3(1)(b) of the Intermediary Rules (IT rules) of the IT Act.
“Gemini is built in line with our AI Principles, and has safeguards to anticipate and test for a wide range of safety risks,” Google added in a thorough statement on the matter. Additionally, we give top priority to locating and stopping detrimental or against-policy comments from appearing in Gemini.
The business stated, “We take information quality seriously across all of our products and have developed tools to help people learn more about the information they see online along with protections against low-quality information.”
