Google announced Thursday it is pausing image generation of people in its Gemini AI app after the tool produced historically inaccurate depictions, including U.S. Founding Fathers as people of color.

The company acknowledged the feature ‘missed the mark,’ saying its tuning to ensure a range of ethnicities ‘failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range.’ Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president, wrote in a blog post that the model became ‘way more cautious than we intended,’ leading to ‘embarrassing and wrong’ outputs.

Jack Krawczyk, a senior director for Gemini, said the company’s image generation capabilities reflect its global user base but acknowledged that ‘Historical contexts have more nuance to them and we will further tune to accommodate that.’ The pause comes as Google races to catch up with Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which last week launched its text-to-video model Sora. The incident has reignited debate about how AI companies balance representation and historical accuracy.