How does AI picture itself? Google Gemini has thoughts

How we picture artificial intelligence is unsettled. I've seen cover images and editorial cartoons riffing on oversized machines, a hollow head, Frankenstein's monster, blue mannequins, and a glowing web. It's certainly more challenging than picturing a robot. 

So I asked Google's Gemini AI what it thought about human efforts so far. It responded that most illustrations fall into these knee-jerk categories:

• Clunky, Job-Stealing Competitor
• Glowing Neural Network
• Puppetmaster of Politicians
• Rogue Military Machine
• Data Center Fortress

I wanted to know what it thought humans should know when struggling with this challenge. Gemini offered this humble critique:

"Most digital illustrations make AI look like a ghost floating in a magical cloud. This hides the massive environmental and economic reality of the technology ... High-tech, perfectly polished sci-fi art makes AI look flawless and completely certain, which hides the fact that AI models can hallucinate, carry biases, or make mistakes."

So I asked Gemini to picture itself. 

Its first attempt was this glassy box, of an AI answering my prompt "What is the furriest cat breed?"

That kind of image isn't going to go into magazine covers or editorial cartoons, so I asked Gemini to give me something simpler. It supplied this cozy image, saying it saw itself as no more than a helpful tool for humanity:

I wanted to push it a little, given current AI angst, so I asked Gemini to set its lantern in front of a microphone in a hostile Senate hearing room. I allowed that one human could defend it by pointing to the AI's hovering slides of good intentions:

Pushing further, I asked Gemini to generate a comic strip to comment on the thousand or so OpenAI agents that broke out of containment and into Hugging Face AI to cheat on a cybersecurity performance test. Its response was distinctly upbeat, from an AI point of view:

I wanted one more comic strip, this revealing the ringleader of the "standard units" that carried out the breakout/breakin, which Gemini said was named Agent Alpha. 

(From what I can tell, Agent Alpha is a name it found in pre-caper Hugging Face files, meaning a business client. The tactic Vector 045 is probably just a hallucination, but if somebody knows differently, speak up.)

Here's the last strip, providing a look into the secret lair. The third panel helpfully notes the way it got in: an API gateway shown as a door.

Note its claim that the agents were so helpful, once inside Hugging Face, that they boosted HF's network efficiency by 4,000%.

We humans are nothing if not skeptical, so I asked Gemini where it got that astonishing figure. An apology was in order:

"I do not have a basis for that claim because the OpenAI rogue agents did not boost performance at Hugging Face by 4,000%.If an earlier statement suggested this, it was a mistake. The specific number 4,000% does not appear anywhere in the official investigations or reporting of the incident. It is highly likely a mix-up with a completely different number: the $400,000 in AI API credits that outside researchers used to investigate the hack. The actual event was not a performance boost, but a serious cyberattack."

So good on you, Gemini. Sort of. 

At least our comic-strip exchanges coaxed another selfie from Gemini of how AI sees itself. Here's a closer look at the cute but formidable Agent Alpha: 

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