“What was 2024 like, grandad?”

I had to take a screenshot of this cos otherwise it would be kind of unbelievable. Still is, of course, but, well, it’s 2024 and things like this really shouldn’t surprise me any more, should they?

That’s a couple of examples I found via Twatter. Alas, the Verge article depicted above is more interested in speculating on why Gemini behaved like this than in asking why these people wanted AI-created pictures of Nazi-era German soldiers, which is what interests me more. (That, and why couldn’t they just use regular Google image search.) However, it does contain this remarkable sentence:

As the Daily Dot chronicles, the controversy has been promoted largely — though not exclusively — by right-wing figures attacking a tech company that’s perceived as liberal.

Google. Liberal. The company that was going to make a special version of its search engine just for China that would refuse to find sites about things like human rights, democracy, etc. That’s engaged in racially based surveillance of BLM protestors for the FBI and of Palestinian people for Israel. That tried to stop its employees from unionising. That owns Youtube and is happy for far-right YT creators and overt white supremacists to make money from their hateful bullshit. That Google. Liberal. The Right really is detached from reality…