Gemini explicitly says that the reason it depicts historical British monarchs as nonwhite is in order to “recognize the increasing diversity in present-day Britain”. It’s exactly the Hamilton strategy — try to make people more comfortable with the diversity of the present by backfilling it into our images of the past.
But where Hamilton was a smashing success, Gemini’s clumsy attempts were a P.R. disaster. Why? Because retroactive representation is an inherently tricky and delicate thing, and AI chatbots don’t have the subtlety to get it right.
Hamilton succeeded because the audience understood the subtlety of the message that was being conveyed. Everyone knows that Alexander Hamilton was not a Puerto Rican guy. They appreciate the casting choice because they understand the message it conveys. Lin-Manuel Miranda does not insult his audience’s intelligence.
Gemini is no Lin-Manuel Miranda (and neither are its creators). The app’s insistence on shoehorning diversity into depictions of the British monarchy is arrogant and didactic. Where Hamilton challenges the viewer to imagine America’s founders as Latino, Black, and Asian, Gemini commands the user to forget that British monarchs were White. One invites you to suspend disbelief, while the other orders you to accept a lie.
I believe that we need to modify the basic story we tell about America, in order to help Americans of all races embrace the country’s new diversity and forge a more unified national identity. That is a tricky and subtle task, and I expect it to take a long time. It’s tempting to believe we can take a shortcut, by simply commanding AI algorithms to remove White people from history. But like most shortcuts to an integrated multiracial society, this one is doomed to failure.
