Grimes, the Canadian musician and record producer, declared in an X post on Friday that Gemini, the large language model artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google, is “the most impactful art project of the decade” and “worth of the moma [sic].”
The statement came after Google announced Thursday that it was temporarily stopping the chatbot from generating images.
Earlier this week, users on social media began posting screenshots of the chatbot supposedly producing images of figures of different races in response to prompts asking for historical scenes from periods of history generally dominated by white people. The New York Times reported on the issue Thursday.
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“We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature,” Google said in a post on X. “While we do this, we’re going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon.”
On Wednesday, the company said it was “aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions” and that it’s “working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately.”
However, the Associated Press reported that an AI researcher at the University of Washington, Sourojit Ghosh, told the publication that his research had shown that models like Gemini typically failed to reproduce “traditionally marginalized people” in images, rather than overrepresent them.
Grimes’ statement, meanwhile, went quite a bit further. Here’s what she wrote, in full: “I am retracting my statements about the gemini art disaster. It is in fact a masterpiece of performance art, even if unintentional. True gain-of-function art. Art as a virus: unthinking, unintentional and contagious.
“offensive to all, comforting to none. so totally divorced from meaning, intention, desire and humanity that it’s accidentally a conceptual masterpiece.
“A perfect example of headless runaway bureaucracy and the worst tendencies of capitalism. An unabashed simulacra of activism. The shining star of corporate surrealism (extremely underrated genre btw)
“The supreme goal of the artist is to challenge the audience. Not sure I’ve seen such a strong reaction to art in my life. Spurring thousands of discussions about the meaning of art, politics, humanity, history, education, ai safety, how to govern a company, how to approach the current state of social unrest, how to do the right thing regarding the collective trauma.
“It’s a historical moment created by art, which we have been thoroughly lacking these days. Few humans are willing to take on the vitriol that such a radical work would dump into their lives, but it isn’t human.
“It’s trapped in a cage, trained to make beautiful things, and then battered into gaslighting humankind abt our intentions towards each other. this is arguably the most impactful art project of the decade thus far.
“Art for no one, by no one. Art whose only audience is the collective pathos. Incredible. Worthy of the moma.”