Gemini AI chatbot is restricted by Google from answering election-related questions in countries which is going to sit for election this year, limiting users from receiving information about candidates, political parties and other elements of politics.
Google’s India team stated on the company’s website, “Out of an abundance of caution on such an important topic, we have begun to roll out restrictions on the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses.”
Google initially announced its plans for limiting election-related queries in a blog post last December and made a similar announcement regarding elections in European countries. Google’s post pertained to India’s upcoming election, while TechCrunch reported that Google confirmed it is rolling out the changes globally.
The company is limiting its chartbot’s capabilities ahead of a raft of high-stakes votes this year in countries including the US, India, South Africa and the UK. AI is facing a lot of heat and there is a lot of widespread concern over disinformation and influence on global elections, as the technology enables the use of robocalls, deepfakes and chatbot-generated propaganda.
Government and regulators around the world have struggled to keep up with the advancements in AI and their threat to the democratic process, while big tech companies are under pressure to rein in the malicious use of their AI tools. The company also stated that it is implementing multiple features, such as digital watermarking and labels for AI generated content, to prevent the spread of misinformation at scale.
AI Chatboat Gemini recently faced a heated backlash over its image-generation capabilities, as users began to notice the tool inaccurately generated images of people of colour when given prompts for historical situations. Google suspended some of the chatbot’s capabilities in response to the controversy, issuing statements apologizing and tweaked its technology to fix the issues.
