Google says it won’t remove explicit content from its search results, in a shot at Microsoft over AI

In a blog post published last week, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, said the company is committed to keeping explicit content out of its search results for appropriate users, in a shot at Microsoft Corp. over artificial intelligence.<br><br>The post, titled "Generative AI: Separating substance from hype," was released after the company said it will launch an AI-powered chat feature called Gemini. Pichai said the tool would be available in the coming weeks and months, and added that it wouldn’t be integrated into its search feature.<br><br>"I am not going to integrate Gemini into Search in a way that could cause a massive degradation in our ability to tell the difference between explicit and non-explicit content," Pichai said. "If you use a search engine and you’re getting (hate speech or) porn next to your explicit search results, you’re not going to use that product anymore."<br><br>The comment was a shot at OpenAI and Microsoft-backed Bing, which rolled out AI-powered search capabilities before Google earlier this year. Gemini and similar tools have been gaining popularity since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in December. As part of that, OpenAI integrated a similar AI feature called Dall-E 3, which was designed to generate explicit content.<br><br>Google executives, like Pichai and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, have said the company is not interested in allowing the tool to generate explicit content.<br><br>"We are not trying to declare that this is a binary decision between explicit and non-explicit (content), but we are choosing to err on the side of more conservative explicitness," Pichai said in the post.<br><br>Gemini will be available in products such as Google Docs, Gmail and Bard, the company said.<br><br>The post was a nod to the company’s vision for AI and how the technology should be used in the future, which differs from OpenAI and Microsoft. OpenAI’s founders said in a blog post last month that the company is committed to creating the first "1,000-year company" and wants to release a massive multimodal model in the next year that would generate audio, video and other forms of content, although it didn’t mention explicit content.