Google restricts election-related queries for its Gemini chatbot

Google announced it will restrict the types of election-related queries that users can ask its Gemini chatbot, adding it has already rolled out the changes in India, where voters will head to the polls this spring.

"Out of an abundance of caution on such an important topic, we have begun to roll out restrictions on the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses," Google wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. "We take our responsibility for providing high-quality information for these types of queries seriously, and are continuously working to improve our protections."

A Google spokesperson told CNBC that the changes were in line with the company's planned approach for elections, and that it's introducing the Gemini restrictions "in preparation for the many elections happening around the world in 2024 and out of an abundance of caution."

The announcement comes after Google pulled its artificial intelligence image generation tool last month following a string of controversies, including historical inaccuracies and contentious responses. The company had introduced the image generator earlier in February through Gemini — Google's main suite of AI models — as part of a significant rebrand.

"We have taken the feature offline while we fix that," Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google's DeepMind, said last month during a panel at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona. "We are hoping to have that back online very shortly in the next couple of weeks, few weeks." He added that the product was not "working the way we intended."

The news also comes as tech platforms are preparing for a huge year of elections worldwide that affect upward of four billion people in more than 40 countries. The rise of AI-generated