Google Admits Gemini AI Promotional Video Was Fabricated
Google launched its Gemini AI platform that ‘wowed’ the tech world. A video posted on YouTube showcased the new AI model’s capabilities to process and reason with text, images, audio, video, and code. However, it has since come to light that Google staged the hands-on video demonstration of Gemini AI.
Google modified interactions with Gemini AI to create the demonstration video. The video is titled “Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with Multimodal AI.”
Google admitted in the video’s description: “For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced, and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity.” In other words, the model’s response time takes much longer than the video showed.
Gemini wasn’t responding to real-world prompts. According to Bloomberg, it was identifying what was being shown in still images:
In reality, the demo also wasn’t carried out in real time or in voice. When asked about the video by Bloomberg Opinion, a Google spokesperson said it was made by “using still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text,” and they pointed to a site showing how others could interact with Gemini with photos of their hands, or of drawings or other objects. In other words, the voice in the demo was reading out human-made prompts they’d made to Gemini, and showing them still images. That’s quite different from what Google seemed to be suggesting: that a person could have a smooth voice conversation with Gemini as it watched and responded in real-time to the world around it.
Google shares were pumped on the Gemini AI release video – only to be sold after reports of the fake video started hitting tech blogs overnight, with Bloomberg reporting Friday morning.
✨More from Google on THAT Gemini “duck” video:
— Parmy Olson (@parmy) December 7, 2023
"We created the demo by capturing footage in order to test Gemini’s capabilities on a wide range of challenges," a spokesperson says. "Then we prompted Gemini using still image frames from the footage, & prompting via text.” (1/5) pic.twitter.com/zeia8gkX6u
A Google spokesperson said that “the user’s voiceover is all real excerpts from the actual prompts used to produce the Gemini output that follows.”
X users were not happy with Google’s video, indicating they felt misled by the tech giant:
Yesterday, Google shocked the world with its new AI, "Gemini."
— Clint Ehrlich (@ClintEhrlich) December 7, 2023
But it turns out the video was fake: the A.I. *cannot* do what Google showed.
It's my opinion, as a lawyer and computer scientist, that (1) Google lied and (2) it broke the law. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/VDfvcwfQeO
