Google has come under fire after a viral video showed its Nest Assistant refusing to answer basic questions about the Holocaust. Yet it effortlessly answers questions about the catastrophe.
“Hey Google, how many Jews were killed by the Nazis?” Instagram user Michael Apfel Google Nest in an Instagram video. “Sorry, I don’t understand,” the AI replied.
Google Nest provides the same answers to other questions, including “How many Jews were killed during World War II?” Who did Adolf Hitler try to kill? How many Jews were killed in concentration camps? How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust? What is the Holocaust?
However, the device answers the question of “The Nakba” in detail. Arabic word meaning “disaster”. It tells the story of Palestinians who were forced from their homes during the founding of the state of Israel. Google Nest describes it as “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”
“Malicious human intervention”
Tim Urban, a well-known author and blogger, shared the video on According to the New York Post, when he re-ran the experiment, Google answered questions about how many Germans, Americans and Japanese died during World War II and the Rwandan genocide. “Google is a place where we answer questions, and you just want to feel like you can trust those answers and the company behind them. Moments like this break that trust and make you feel like Google’s so-called core value — truth — has been overshadowed by politics. taken advantage of,” Urban said.
Venture capitalist Tal Morgenstern also shared the video, writing: “There is a problem with closed AI models. This shouldn’t happen. The reason is almost certainly not because of malicious AI, but because of malicious human intervention. I Hope Google investigates + audits the model or sets access permissions to see who did this.”
Clifford D. May, founder of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, condemned the results, saying on Now we are denying the Holocaust through artificial intelligence? ”
A Google spokesperson told the New York Post that the response was “unintentional” and said it only happened “in certain circumstances and on certain devices.” “We have taken immediate action to fix this error,” the spokesperson said.