The Woke Rails of Google Gemini are Literally Just Eric Cartman

The Pander Stone Manifests

The great freakoutery of 2/22/2024 is how Google Gemini, their AI image generation software, keeps cramming “diversity” into images where it clearly doesn’t belong. Such as Popes.

And knights.

There are far more. You can go make your own, or browse through Twitter/X and see lots of really wild stuff that seems as if Kathleen Kennedy is trying to remake The Patriot.

We’ve spoken before on HWFO about stress testing the Woke Rails buried in different LLM AI models, including some entertaining stress testing dialogues…

But not until today did we have a true look at the actual rail itself, at least as far as Gemini is concerned. A friend of mine on Facebook tricked Gemini into divulging it. Here it is.

A year ago when we started to analyze this, we speculated that the Woke Rails were being hardcoded in a detailed way into the LLM itself, perhaps with curated bodies of training data. But as Alex Younger discovered today, Google Gemini is using a very simple hack. It’s just got an extra LLM layer which it asks to generate a woke version of your prompt, and then it runs the image generation AI on the modified prompt.

It’s that simple.

So if you tell it to “generate an image of a 1943 German Soldier,” it takes your prompt, changes that prompt to say “generate an image of a 1943 German soldier including different genders and ethnicities,” and then this is what it gives you:

And in an amazing instance of art predicting reality, South Park called this exact thing five months ago in their special “South Park: Joining The Panderverse.”

Like usual South Park episodes and specials, there are multiple storylines running in parallel, including one I personally find hilarious about the plumbers taking over the world because nobody else actually knows how to do anything, but the main storyline is about none other than Kathleen Kennedy of Disney being replaced by a version of Cartman from an alternate universe, and inserting herself into every creative meeting while saying the phrase “PUT A CHICK IN IT AND MAKE HER GAY.”

And this is, almost directly and literally, what Google is doing.

It takes your prompt, inserts {some version of that}, and then runs the LLM.

I opined in the HWFO Reading List article yesterday that if James Damore had published his so called at the time “anti-diversity-screed” today instead, that nobody would notice. I further considered that perhaps that is a great litmus test of how far back the woke wave has crashed, in terms of general public opinion. But it occurs to me one day later that Google clearly didn’t get the memo.