I tend to like Megan McArdle’s takes on things so it’s no surprise to me that her take on Google Gemini is pretty solid. As she sees it, Gemini is a case of Google saying the quiet part out loud. What she means is that this isn’t just a wonky new product that is drawing some black popes and black Vikings because the image creation software isn’t ready for prime time. There’s more to it than that. Google has accidentally revealed something that a smoother product release might have kept hidden. The problem here runs deep.
Gemini appears to have been programmed to avoid offending the leftmost 5 percent of the U.S. political distribution, at the price of offending the rightmost 50 percent.
It effortlessly wrote toasts praising Democratic politicians — even controversial ones such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (Minn.) — while deeming every elected Republican I tried too controversial, even…
