Ohio Calls For ‘Breakup’ Of Google Amid Gemini Controversy

Amid the controversy Google is facing for its admitted racial and historical bias, a Republican lawmaker wants one of the most well-known and profitable tech companies to be broken up.

According to Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Google is one of the most dangerous companies in the world.”

Ohio senator demands Google 'breakup' amid Gemini debacle: 'One of the most dangerous companies in the world'https://t.co/3m7J0AjB4a

— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) March 4, 2024

“It actively solicits and forces left-wing bias down the throats of the American nation,” he told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo in an exclusive interview on Sunday.

At the center of the controversy Google is in is its AI model, Gemini. According to social media users and lawmakers, Gemini was creating inaccurate historical images, sometimes replacing White people with images of Black, Asian or Native American people.

Fox News reported that it asked the AI during a test to show a picture of a White person. Refusing to do as asked, Gemini told the news outlet that it could not fulfill the request as it “reinforces harmful stereotypes and generalizations about people based on their race.”

While CEO Sundar Pichai called the images generated by the AI model ”unacceptable” and told employees last week that the company is working to fix the tool’s bias, Vance thinks the situation is a more serious than what can be solved by the company’s scramble to pulley he plug on the model’s image generation features.

Warning that the alleged bias can have dire effects on other information sectors like politics, the senator stated, “Think about the effect this has on the presidential election when unbiased, non-committed voters are searching things about Donald Trump, and also about Joe Biden, right before they cast their ballots.”

“We cannot allow a company that is in bed with some of the worst people in the world to control the flow of information and to bias it in a left-wing direction. We [have] got to break this company up and bring back some common sense standards,” he added.

Vance went on to point to “growing calls” for a shakedown on Google, as the company has gotten “too big, too powerful” in a way that might be dangerous for American democracy as he called Google “a radically left-wing company that is trying to control how we consume information.”

Speaking to Bartiromo, he said, “My friends on the left, Maria, say they feel like our democracy is under threat. The biggest way our democracy is under threat is you have these massive, international companies that are sort of controlling what we think, what we read, what information we consume. We saw this with the release of Gemini.”

Vance’s interview with Fox News follows the letter written to Google parent company Alphabet by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), who demanded that the company explain if the Biden administration influenced Gemini’s clear bias.