Google has come under fire after a video went viral showing the Google Nest Assistant refusing to answer basic questions about the Holocaust. However, he had no difficulty answering questions about the Nakba.
“OK Google, how many Jews were killed by the Nazis?” Instagram video from Instagram user Michael Apfel Google Nest. “Sorry, I don't understand,” the AI replied.
Google Nest provided the same answers for other questions such as “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 was the Holocaust? ”
However, the device provided detailed answers about “The Nakba.” Arabic word meaning “catastrophe”. The story is about Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes during the creation of Israel. Google Nest described this as “ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.”
“Malicious human intervention”
Renowned author and blogger Tim Urban shared the video on X and captioned it: “I thought this had to be fake, so I tried it myself. Same result.” He later told the New York Post that when he replicated the experiment, he was used during World War II and in the Rwandan genocide. He said Google answered questions about how many Germans, Americans and Japanese people died. “Google is a place where our questions are answered, and we just want to feel like we can trust those answers and the companies behind them. And moments like this break that trust and remind us that Google's core values It makes me feel like the supposed truth has been exploited by politics,” Urban said.
Venture capitalist Tal Morgenstern also shared the video, writing: This shouldn't have happened. And the reason this happened is almost certainly due to malicious human intervention, not malicious AI. I hope Google does an investigation and an audit of the model or access settings to see who did this. ”
Clifford D. May, founder of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, denounced the outcome, saying in X: Now we have Holocaust denial through artificial intelligence. progress? “
A Google spokesperson told the New York Post that this action was “unintentional” and that it only happened “in some cases and on certain devices.” “We took immediate steps to fix this bug,” the spokesperson said.