Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence-driven image creator, shocked the world by replacing historical, white figures with people of color. So horrified, was the reaction to one of the earliest displays of AI, that the search engine colossus shut Gemini down to work out the so-called kink.

But this was no mistake, former Google executives tell The Free Press. Google intentionally has an ingrained, extreme ideological culture, they say, that puts diversity, equity and inclusion ahead of excellence and sound business sense.

Asking Google’s AI chatbot to search for “Nazis,” for instance, resulted in AI-generated Black Nazis. A request for “America’s founding fathers” produced a Black George Washington; and for an image of the pope, a female pontiff.

The woke bias would even have blown the mind of George Orwell, author of “1984,” the classic critique of a dystopian, totalitarian future — not unlike 2024.

“I was not shocked at all,” says Shaun Maguire, a former partner with Google Ventures, the company’s investment wing.

“When the first Google Gemini photos popped up on my X feed, I thought to myself, ‘Here we go again. Of course. Because I know Google well,” Maguire says. “Google’s Gemini failures revealed how broken Google’s culture is in such a visually obvious way to the world.

“But what happened was not a one-off incident. It was a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon that has been taking over the company for years.”

Maguire and other ex-Googlers say they were discouraged from hiring qualified, white, male candidates, that DEI “is part of every single thing.” Even engineers have to quantify the “DEI impact” of every software change, no matter how insignificant.

Most disappointing to the former Googlers is that the Big Tech giant entered the AI race with what they viewed as an upper hand — but, they believe, Google has squandered it in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion “social justice.”

Earlier this month, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told entrepreneurs at a San Francisco conference, “We haven’t fully understood why it [Gemini] leans left in many cases. That’s not our intention.”

It would appear that Brin was merely posturing, according to a former Google AI researcher, who asked not to be named.

“The model is just a reflection of the people who trained it,” the researcher attests. It’s just a series of decisions that humans have made.”

Maguire, who sold two successful companies before joining Google, one for $1.5 billion, said he joined the company even though “the word around Silicon Valley was that Google had already lost its way.”

Maguire did not know that he was in for a real shock: “It was only where I got there that I realized the full extent of” Google’s cultural biases.

James Damore, a former Google software engineer, says Google, unfortunately like many other major American companies, suffers from an “ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.”

In Damore’s view, “discriminating” against qualified candidates for jobs “just to increase the representation of women in tech is misguided and biased.”

Damore chronicled his opinions in a memo to all employees in 2017 titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” Predictably, he was fired a month later for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes.”

Maguire maintains that extremism at Google became even more radical after Damore’s ouster. “Damore’s firing emboldened them to push a more ideological agenda,” Maguire sys.

David Kiferbaum, a Google business manager from 2015 to 2023, says he was put off by Google’s blatant aversion to hiring or promoting whites. “I was like, ‘Whoa, I can’t believe this person is saying this out loud,’” Kiferbaum says.

In 2017, he recalls, Google Ventures started making “unreasonable demands,” most notably, the command to hire females as general partners, quickly. Because of the imposed quotas, Kiferbaum hired a new female general partner “who was really smart but who wasn’t qualified for the job. Because of her lack of experience, she was never treated on the same level as the other general partners, which I believe was ultimately unfair to her.”

When asked for comment, Google Ventures called Maguire’s and Kiferbaum’s “baseless and factually inaccurate claims. GV’s decisions around hiring and promotion are solely based on merit and ability.”