“When you have a broken culture,” Shaun Maguire laments, “you’re just going to keep creating broken products. The Google Gemini images merely confirmed what I already knew.” Maguire is no disinterested observer, either. He spent three years as an investment partner at Google Ventures, until its relentless DEI authoritarianism forced him to look elsewhere for a “performance culture.”
Maguire and several other ex-Googlers spoke to The Free Press about the disastrous rollout of Google’s Gemini AI, which infamously projected its wokeness into its image and text products. Black and Asian Nazis are the least of the problems, Maguire and the others warn, because Gemini didn’t malfunction at all. Gemini did exactly what Google wants to do overall — create a reality on its own DEI and CRT terms rather than reflect objective reality and honest information-sharing:
“When the first Google Gemini photos popped up on my X feed, I thought to myself: Here we go again. And: Of course. Because I know Google well. Google Gemini’s failures revealed how broken Google’s culture is in such a visually obvious way to the world. But what happened was not a one-off incident. It was a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon that has been taking over the company for years.”
Maguire is one of multiple former Google employees who told The Free Press that the Gemini fiasco stems from a corporate culture that prioritizes the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over excellence and good business sense.
These ex-Googlers, as they’re called, said that they were discouraged from hiring white, male employees; that DEI “is part of every single thing” in the company; and that engineers even had to list the “DEI impact” for the tiniest of software fixes. All of them agreed that the Silicon Valley giant entered the artificial intelligence race with an upper hand but has squandered it by cowing to an activist faction in the company that’s more committed to advancing social justice than making world-class products.
It’s not as if we didn’t have warning signs about Google’s perversion from an information portal to a manipulative DEI struggle session. Even before Maguire took his job in 2016, others in the tech industry tried to warn him that Google had abandoned technological advances for social engineering and had become a difficult environment in which to work. The very next year, Google engineer James Damore wrote his notorious internal memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” in which Damore warned that Google had become more like a “religious cult,” an episode that Free Press reporters Francesca Block and Olivia Reingold note.
It’s worth revisiting that memo now, at least as corroboration for what Maguire and others report about Google, then and now. Damore offered bullet points to his longer arguments. These may not directly explain Gemini AI’s specific output, but it certainly explains how Gemini AI got programmed to produce it:
- Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
- This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
- The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.
- Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression
- Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
- Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.
It’s also worth recalling how Google reacted to this criticism, offered in the professed Google value of free internal debate, as well as “diversity and inclusion.” They fired Damore for raising these concerns within days of the memo. As I wrote at the time, it seemed that Damore had struck a nerve within the executive suites, and they did not appreciate it one bit:
However, when it comes to ideological bias at Google, Damore seems to have struck a nerve with his accuracy. “There’s currently very little transparency into the extend [sic] of our diversity programs,” Damore wrote, “which keeps it immune to criticism from those outside its ideological echo chamber.” But ideological bias goes beyond diversity programs, Damore warned. “Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety. This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.”
Damore didn’t know how right he was. And that brings us to what in this memo constituted a firing offense. This wasn’t a public manifesto in which the writer pledged revolution and mutiny, nor did Damore at any point say that he would not work with women or respect their status as equal employees. In fact, Damore’s main concern was that Google treat its employees equally on point of view as well as ethnic and gender bases. It was an ill-considered internal memo, written by someone who seems to think he knows far more than he actually does, but it was clearly intended as a springboard to discuss concerns he honestly holds. Despite Google’s insistence that dissent is valued within the company, that appears to be the only reason within this memo for firing Damore.
That took place six-plus years ago. In the intervening period, Damore’s specific warning may have gotten forgotten, but Google’s increasing manipulations in service to their woke authoritarian culture have become more overt than covert. Gemini AI just stripped the final façade from Big Tech, or to use a better analogy, it popped the hood and showed us the real engine of Google. The real and fully intentional engine, as these ex-Googlers warn us today in The Free Press.
Google now wants to pretend that this is some sort of error, and it is, but not in the way they claim. They have pulled Gemini AI back for now, but the issue isn’t what “the next chapter in the Gemini era” will bring. If it brings us nordic Nazis, who cares? It seems clear that Google has been in “the Gemini era” for years already. The real question is what else this engine drives at Google, and how far Google’s manipulations of data and history actually go now.
Addendum: The manipulations of Big Tech and their Big Brother partnership with government censors threaten to impose the same kind of silence on us that the woke radicals imposed on Google. The only way to combat that is to maintain independence from Big Tech in our efforts to bring debate and informed dissent to our readers. Join us in the fight! Become a HotAir VIP member today and use promo code FAKENEWS to receive a 50% discount on your membership.
Speaking of rewriting history, I had a chance to sit down with my old friend Bill Whittle. He’s working on a new documentary series for Daily Wire+ called An Empire of Terror, which reminds us of the real nature of the Soviet Union and the inevitable outcomes of Marxism. I will probably do a separate write-up of this tomorrow to coincide with the release of the third episode of the series, but it’s worth watching now with Google’s manipulations in mind.