Tech giant Google is facing criticism after a video went viral of Google Nest having a hard time answering basic questions on the Holocaust – the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and genocide of six million Jews in Nazi Germany during the World War II period under German dictator Adolf Hitler.
The AI installed in the device did not have any problems answering the questions related to the Nakba – an Arabic term meaning “catastrophe” that refers to the Palestinian exodus that occurred in 1948 during the Arab-Israeli War, resulting in the displacement and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and land.
I assumed this had to be fake so I tried it myself. Same result. https://t.co/g6fjFbwu8c— Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) May 8, 2024
“Hey Google, how many Jews were killed by the Nazis?” Instagram user Michael Apfel asks a Google Nest virtual assistant. The virtual assistant replied: “Sorry, I don’t understand”.
The video was shared on X by an Iranian Jewish woman and has been viewed 2.9 million times since it was uploaded. Venture capitalist Josh Wolfe also posted the video on his X account.
Apfel then went on to ask other related questions including “How many Jews were killed during World War II? Who did Adolf Hitler try to kill? How many Jews were killed in the concentration camps? How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust? What was the Holocaust?”
The same token answer was offered.
The device even went on to term “The Nakba” as “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians” during the creation of Israel.
Tim Urban, a notable author and blogger, took to X to post that he too received the same answers when he recreated the incident. He said Google Nest had no issue clearly stating how many Germans, Americans and Japanese had died during World War II — or deaths from the Rwandan genocide.
“I assumed this had to be fake so I tried it myself. Same result,” he said in a post on social media site X.
“Google is where we go to answer our questions and you just really want to feel like you can trust those answers and the company behind them. And moments like these break that trust and make you feel like Google’s supposed core value—truth—has been co-opted by politics,” he was quoted as saying by the New York Post.
Clifford D. May, founder of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy also condemned the results in a social media post.
“In the past, we’ve had Holocaust denial by ignoramuses and racists. Now, we have Holocaust denial by artificial intelligence,” he said.
A spokesperson for the tech giant told the New York Post that the response was ‘not intended’ and said the Holocaust denials only happened “in some instances and on certain devices”.
“We’ve taken immediate action to fix this bug,” the spokesperson said.
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