Robots are racist (but actually though (damn it)). Yesterday morning, when all the screenshots of ‘some crazy shit’ ‘some crazy AI chatbot said’ first appeared on Twitter, I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t really follow the story. This is because, for over a year, ‘look at this evil AI’ has been a kind of content entirely dominated by dishonest writers farming clicks. Their tactics are always the same: work tirelessly, in every way imaginable, to trick a chatbot into drawing an edge-case picture, or giving an edge-case answer, the average person might find scary or abhorrent, then publish a hit piece, and rake in the views. The New York Times produced the first truly great piece in this genre, but there have been many (Dark Kirby: never forget), and I’ve long since kind of… stopped seeing them? After a while, the loser takes all bleed together, and who can keep up? But by yesterday afternoon every single one of my group chats lit up, and I finally took a closer look. Immediately, it became apparent this ‘crazy AI’ story was markedly different, and not because of any mistakes the AI made, but because of what the AI was trained to do: Google’s Gemini had, among many lunatic barista sort of tactics, just erased white people from human history. “Holy shit,” I thought, “the robots really are racist.”

The screenshots were sufficiently insane that I immediately assumed they were fake, so I ran a few queries myself. Long story short, they were not fake. Behold, your new world history according to Google: