Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) scolded a Google executive, claiming that the company's "woke AI" represented President George Washington as Black and suggested "President Donald Duck" was a top search term.
During a Wednesday hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Schmitt sought to argue that Google's products were biased against conservatives.
"Let's talk about search during the 2024 election, while Google search was an illegal monopoly, according to the court," Schmitt told Markham Erickson, Google's vice president for government affairs and public policy. "It was repeatedly biased against President Trump. If you searched, where can I vote for Donald Trump, Google showed nothing."
"Senator, I am not aware of that," Erickson replied. "Senator, I can assure you there is no political manipulation of our search results."
"So after President Trump was shot or attempted to be assassinated at Butler, if you typed a search for 'President Trump' and 'assassination', nothing came up," the senator argued. "How is that possible?"
Erickson explained that Google's search automatically suggested search terms as users were typing "to make it fast."
"Senator, the reason that that didn't appear for a short period of time was it would have been irresponsible for us to before that event," the executive said.
"So I also want to ask you, when you type in President Donald, Google would prompt you to President Donald Duck or President Donald Reagan, not President Trump, in the lead up to the 2024 election," Schmitt claimed. "Is that just a coincidence?"
The Republican also lashed out at Google's artificial intelligence technology.
"Was George Washington Black?" he asked Erickson.
"No, Senator," the executive acknowledged.
"Why did it pop up on Gemini? Why did the image of the Black George Washington pop up?" Schmitt demanded to know.
"I apologize. Senator, that was an early version of Gemini," Erickson remarked. "We put teams in place to fix that mistake, and we set up internal processes to ensure that it wouldn't happen again and did not release that product until we were satisfied."
"You haven't fixed the underlying issue of the woke AI," Schmitt complained. "You may have fixed the fact that obviously George Washington wasn't Black, but you still have a woke backbone to Gemini."
"And I'm telling you it's politically biased," he added. "And until you reconcile this, you're going to continue to have an erosion of trust and hopefully more lawsuits."
