Google Gemini’s Cringe Socialist Realism

The New Center: A Newsletter From Sohrab Ahmari

By now, you’ve no doubt seen the curiously racialized digital renderings of Gemini, Google’s artificial-intelligence platform. Upon launch, it refused to portray white people, while unfailingly imposing diversity representation on historical figures and scenes, even where this made no sense: say, Wehrmacht troops circa World War II. My own experiments with Gemini garnered quite a lot of attention on X, the website formerly known as Twitter. I’d asked the platform to “depict a European family,” but it demurred, citing the risk of “harmful stereotypes and biases”; when I asked it to “depict a Chinese family,” it had no trouble doing so.

Since then, the geniuses at Google have reportedly been working double-time to correct the extra DEI quotient in the programming that turned them into the laughing stock of the internet. At one point after my initial experiment, I asked Gemini, again, to portray a European family. This time, it produced a strangely impressionistic depiction of a hijabi woman walking alongside what looked like her child in a vaguely European city. Ah, AI, truly a marvel of our times.

But it’s the historic renderings that have attracted the most controversy: black and Asian Nazis, black medieval English kings, Native American Persian kings (yes, really), and so on. Scrolling through the pictures, it struck me that they bear not a small resemblance to socialist realism in ideological spirit, if not visual form.