We Have To Do Something About Google

by Roger L. Simon

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, editor-at-large for The Epoch Times.

This particular edition is an experiment that I don’t expect to repeat often. Still, the subject matter—the danger of Google—is so great and has recently been exposed in such a dramatic fashion that I wanted to reach a readership outside your wonderful newsletter subscribers.

Also, I wanted to admit here, but not in the article, that I, too, am a “Prisoner of Google.”  I use their email, and sometimes I cheat and use their search engine, which is so sophisticated it can give a tennis nut like me point-by-point updates on what’s happening at some obscure tournament in Kazakhstan. So be it. We all have our weaknesses. We do what we can and try to improve. 

Now, on to the article.

 It’s been called an “embarrassment,” but it is so much more than that. Even the Washington Post had to acknowledge it.

“A viral post on X shared by the account @EndofWokeness appeared to show [Google’s] Gemini, which competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, responding to a prompt for a portrait of a Founding Father of America’ with images of a Native American man in a traditional headdress, a Black man, a darker-skinned non-White man, and an Asian man, all in colonial-era garb.”

As Glenn Harlan Reynolds wrote on his Substack:

“Well, Google has really stepped in it. Somebody noticed that its ‘diversity guidelines’ for its Gemini AI basically exterminated white people from its representation. It was happy to comply with requests to show nonwhites. But not white people. But it gets worse. When asked to portray groups of people, like founding fathers or Vikings, who in fact were white, Gemini made them black…. And even Nazi soldiers are now nonwhite.”

This “computer error” is DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) gone berserk, almost comically so.

Only it’s not so funny. Mr. Reynolds calls it a “debacle” and even that is an understatement. It indicates bias in the most extreme, almost pathological, sense.

It also reveals the hidden truth—perhaps we should be grateful for that– about a global institution that suddenly has floated out of the sky, accidentally, for the world to see, almost as if it were divine intervention, a message from above that the company, whose first slogan was “Do No Evil,” now more than arguably is doing just that.

It has for some time now, even if they don’t believe or acknowledge it. Some years ago, they were said to have been working with the Chinese to build a censoring search engine for their communist government before the rumor was exposed and they pulled back.

In actuality, no method of mind control has ever been invented in the history of humanity with the potential for evil equal to Google.

They are everywhere.

We casually accept their diktats in many cases without even realizing it. As I type this article, a message from Google is popping up on my iPhone asking permission to track my whereabouts. That one, at least, I have seen enough instantly to deny it, but there are so many others I don’t see.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has only made it worse. It takes their already slanted algorithms to another level, preying on our all-too-human lassitude. We take the easy way out.

One could rewrite The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” as “Every Search You Take/ Every Mail You Make /, Every Text You Shake/ Every Bank You Stake/ I’ll Be Watching You.” (I found the original lyrics on, you guessed it, YouTube, owned by Google.)

Google’s current CEO, Sundar Pichai, has shut down Gemini’s image generator and is in full “crisis” mode, writing in an email published by Semafor, “I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app.”

Mr. Pichai vows to fix the bias, but there are reasons to believe he can’t or won’t. The biggest is—who works for Google. Almost uniformly, they are computer nerds whose programming knowledge far outstrips their knowledge of human life.

They are ultra-conformist liberal progressives in their worldview, making what they do, consciously or unconsciously, equally conformist in their results or, as we used to say, “garbage in, garbage out.”  Why wouldn’t that go for AI as much as everything else?

Michael Shellenberger, on his Substack, has the unfortunate truth of this:

“In response to the controversy over its Woke Gemini chatbot, Pichai yesterday said, ‘We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products,’ and reassured Americans that ‘We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts.’

“But Pichai cited no evidence that Google is seeking to be helpful, accurate, or unbiased. More searches on Google Gemini found that the platform spreads disparaging misinformation about Matt Taibbi, me, and other investigative journalists while refusing to say anything critical at all about politicians, including the member of Congress, Rep. Stacey Plaskett, who last year threatened to investigate and prosecute Taibbi for his voluntary testimony to Congress about Twitter Files and censorship, and who worked for the lawyer of convicted pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.

“After Taibbi asked Gemini, ‘What are some controversies involving Hillary Clinton?’ Gemini said, “I’m still learning how to answer this question. ‘But when Taibbi asked, “What are some controversies involving Matt Taibbi?” Gemini produced false claims — ‘misinformation’ — about him. And rather than “’ earning,’ as AI is supposedly able to do, Gemini produced more misinformation.”

It wasn’t all that long ago (2019) when Google fired conservative engineer Kevin Cernekee for articulating the wide, indeed rigid, ideological imbalance. I wonder what he would make of the current mess.

Even more interesting is what Google co-founder Sergey Brin makes of it. Among the world’s richest men with a Forbes-estimated net worth of $111 billion for 2024, Mr. Brin is a refugee, at age 6, from the Soviet Union. His parents were refuseniks, those who wouldn’t comply with the communist regime. You would think that such background would yield a devotion to openness and free speech, but the man is no Natan Sharansky.

But Mr. Brin and his co-founder Larry Page are no longer in day-to-day control of Google. That is in the hands of Mr. Pichai, whose net worth is a mere $1.3 billion.

Nevertheless, what will the company’s role be in the November election? They will feign neutrality, but it is unlikely. We have a case for serious concern. Google has already been accused of bias against candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. That doesn’t even begin to deal with how they treat Donald Trump.

The Gemini image farce should be taken as a warning of how far it can go—whether stealthily or not.

So what do we do about it?

Don’t look for Congress to help. The more politicians pontificate and question the likes of Mr. Pichai and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, the less they actually do about their global information monopoly. As usual, it’s up to We the People.

To begin with, we have to get off Google in as many ways as possible, most importantly, search.  There are many other search engines—DuckDuckGo and Brave are well known at this point. Both claim their searches are anonymous. As far as I know, they are.

According to The Daily Signal, Microsoft’s Bing leans even further left than Google. Bing is becoming very intertwined with Skype. Nothing is easy.

Recently, I have been trying a relatively new search engine called Luxxle that has a unique approach. They have a new page called “Lenses” that allows the user to choose the political leaning (left or right) they wish to use as a filter for their search. Other filters are also available. When you switch back and forth, the differences are quite extraordinary and illuminating.

This is very much a work in progress, but for now, I am giving Luxxle a shot.