Google's 'woke' AI image fiasco follows years of revisionist history in academia

Google has temporarily stopped an artificial intelligence program’s image making capability that many claimed was creating distorted historical images in the service of a political agenda. 

Google’s Gemini AI program stirred controversy as users asked the program to make images of different historical persons, with the resulting pictures ending up being unhistorical and attracting criticism for being “absurdly woke” and “unusable” according to some, reported the New York Post. 

The pictures included a black man who seemingly personified George Washington, female popes, and racially diverse non-white Vikings, wrote New York Post. 

Following the controversy, Google announced on Feb. 22 that it would halt Gemini’s ability to generate images for the moment, the Post continued. 

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In a Dec. 6 blog post, Google referred to Gemini as “the most capable and general model we’ve ever built” and stated that “Gemini 1.0 was trained to recognize and understand text, images, audio and more at the same time, so it better understands nuanced information and can answer questions relating to complicated topics.”

The controversy comes as colleges and universities nationwide have for years been pursuing various “decolonization” initiatives aimed at altering racial perspectives around history, among other subjects. 

I asked Google Gemini to generate images of the Founding Fathers. It seems to think George Washington was black. pic.twitter.com/CsSrNlpXKF

— Patrick Ganley (@Patworx) February 21, 2024

Merriam-Webster defines “decolonize” as “to free from the dominating influence of a colonizing power, especially: to identify, challenge, and revise or replace assumptions, ideas, values, and practices that reflect a colonizer’s dominating influence and especially a Eurocentric dominating influence.”

On March 9, 2021, Campus Reform exposed an event titled “Decolonizing the Stacks” at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School, in which the event moderator described such “decolonization” as “the process of de-centering whiteness and being more inclusive to voices of color and voices representing diverse perspectives,” and said that library indexing systems are “inherently biased and centered on the perspectives of white people, Christians, heterosexuals, and males.”

Just days prior, Campus Reform covered Cornell University’s decision to change the name of the “Department of English” to the “Department of Literatures in English” to serve a larger campaign of “decolonization efforts.”

On Dec. 3, 2023, a University of Minnesota professor called for the destruction of the United States, issuing a call to “decolonize [the U.S.]” and reportedly adding: “I seek to dismantle the United States, I hope you seek to dismantle the United States.”

More recently, calls for “decolonization” have been tied to instances of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel rhetoric and actions in some institutions of higher education. 

On Oct. 8, 2023, a day after the Hamas terrorist attack that killed more than 1,000 Israelis, the group Decolonize This Place, which was co-founded by New York University professor Amin Husain, praised the “heroic Palestinian resistance” and blamed Israel, saying: “75 years of colonization, state violence with impunity, and illegal occupation must end.”

Also on Oct. 8, 2023, a Vanderbilt University fellow, Ayesha Khan, posted an infographic on Instagram that claimed: “The Palestinian people are resisting 75 years of settler colonialism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and a violent, brutal military occupation. This is what decolonization looks like. This is what a revolution takes. This is what land defense means.”


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Campus Reform Editor in Chief Dr. Zachary Marschall wrote in a March 6, 2022 article that “Decolonization wants bulldozing iconoclasm,” arguing that this ideology lacks nuance and “presents a false binary between preserve and delete.”

A 2022 book by Cornell professor Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò also condemns “decolonization,” stating that “[h]e finds ‘decolonisation’ of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society’s foundations. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers,” according to the book product page. 

Google responded to Campus Reform’s request for comment, referencing its own updated statement on X, which says: “We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately. Gemini’s Al image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here.”