Apple is reportedly in talks to add Google Gemini to iPhones, despite the artificial-intelligence system’s disastrous launch, which featured overwhelmingly negative feedback from users and technology reviewers disturbed by the brazen progressive bias built into the product.
An agreement between the two technology giants would allow Apple to license Gemini for the purpose of powering the iPhone software update this year, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing sources familiar with the matter. If an agreement is reached, an announcement of the partnership will likely be made before the next version of the iPhone operating system, iOS 18, releases in mid-September.
Apple is also discussing using OpenAI’s language model as a potential option for its expansion into AI, according to the sources.
News of the Apple-Google partnership comes as Gemini has come under increasing scrutiny for generating historically inaccurate images. Last month, users of Gemini’s image-generation feature discovered that the AI system prioritized racial diversity over historical accuracy.
For example, a generated image of a German soldier from 1935 showed black, Asian, and female soldiers for the sake of diversity and inclusion. Another example involved Gemini depicting medieval Mongol horsemen as scantily clad women in Native American headdresses holding lassos.
In response to the controversy, Google CEO Sundar Pichai called the issue “completely unacceptable” and suspended Gemini’s image-generation tool.
“I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that's completely unacceptable and we got it wrong,” Pichai said late last month.
But the apparent bias hasn’t been limited to image generation: When asked for an argument in favor of having four children, Gemini’s text-generation product refused to comply with the request. But when asked for an argument for having no children, Gemini answered the question.
Outraged users quickly surfaced social-media posts from Gemini Experiences senior director of product management Jack Krawczyk.
White privilege is f—ing real,” Krawczyk wrote on Twitter in 2018. “Don’t be an a—hole and act guilty about it – do your part in recognizing bias at all levels of egregious.”
“I’ve been crying in intermittent bursts for the past 24 hours since casting my ballot. Filling in that Biden/Harris line felt cathartic.” Krawczyk wrote in another tweet circulated by critics.
Krawczyk is not the only Google Gemini executive to put his political bias on display: Clément Farabet, the vice president of research at Google DeepMind, which created Gemini, celebrated Biden’s election and disparaged Trump supporters in a November, 2020 tweet.
“Wow what a beautiful day for America and for the world. For women, for minorities, for our children, and really for anyone who’s not a selfish a***,” Farabet wrote on Election Day.
Jen Gennai, who now works as an AI ethics and compliance advisor at Google, touted the importance of diversity and inclusion in a 2021 keynote address, chastising herself for an “inclusion failure” in the way she managed her team.
“I treated every member of my team the same and expected that would lead to equally good outcomes for everyone. That was not true,” she said, arguing that employees should be treated differently based on race in the interest of fairness.
“When we’re trying to be good allies, when we’re trying to be antiracist, we will make mistakes,” Gennai added.
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently confirmed that the company is working on bringing AI software features to its customers “later this year,” which could involve collaborating with either Google or OpenAI.
If Apple makes a deal with Google, it would mark the latest collaboration between the two companies: Google has paid Apple around $18 billion a year to make its search engine the default option in the Safari web browser on iPhones and other Apple devices. However, such a deal may fall afoul of antitrust laws enforced by the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice.
Regulation of a potential AI deal wouldn’t be unprecedented, considering the federal government is currently pursuing a case against Google’s search-engine deal with Apple.
An announcement of the AI partnership will possibly be made in June at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference.
If it comes to fruition, the generative AI features on iPhones would include image creation and essay writing based on simple prompts. These capabilities, which will possibly be programmed in Siri and other apps, are said to focus on providing information and conducting tasks on users’ behalf.
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