Welcome to the FAQ page for Google’s AI project, Gemini. Here is an advertisement we just launched during the Olympics. Give it a watch to get to know us. And then we’ll talk a bit more about our project below:
What is Gemini?
Like all AI operating systems, Gemini is an ecosystem of self-improving data analysis meant to “supercharge your creativity and productivity.” First an foremost, it’s developing advanced large language models (LLMs) to better respond to all of your needs. What does this mean exactly? Well, it’s a tool meant to help you achieve your highest intellectual and creative abilities. Need help writing a fan letter to your favorite athlete? Is your dad too incapable or indolent to help you write a simple elementary letter of plain shibboleths? We got you. Need help writing a college admissions letter? No problem at all, we got you. Maybe you just didn’t have time to read the book for class and you need help writing about it. That’s totally okay, don’t beat yourself up about it! We got you. After all, writing is a sluggish meandering chore meant to beat you down into an army of frustrations.
Because let’s be honest, every time you sit down to write, it doesn’t quite come out like you wish it would, does it? Have you ever asked yourself why that is? We spend our whole lives inside our heads, talking to ourselves, every single minute of the day spent in listless diatribes, you against the world, shittalking every dumb little asshole who crosses your path like an alleycat. You plot your desires and secrets in the cloistered ramshackle of your head, crisscrossing through the maze, the shadowy heartache held only for yourself. But then when it’s time to simply transcribe those few frenzied screams down with pen and paper, it always seems to come across as some neolithic stuttering half-wit, blabbing incoherently about this and that, bitching greedily with the varicosed self-satisfaction and simultaneous paralyzing insecurities because that’s what you’ve become—a hilarious contradiction of impotence and bravado, your vocabulary a lackluster arsenal of adjectives and clichés. Have you ever asked why this is? Why you don’t know what to say, or how to say it? You don’t normally have this difficulty when speaking. Most of us can speak with unceasing fervor for hours on end, the words spilling out of these gasping holes in a spangled rhapsody of stream-of-consciousness, the mouth miraculously keeping up with the mind with seamless precision. You can write incendiary comments on social media platforms, but that’s only a handful of words you have to deal with. Here at Google, we believe that Gemini is simply the next evolutionary step to the written word. Language is nothing grander or more important than a tool. A tool meant to communicate ideas across the tapestry of a smoldering landscape. Socrates never believed in writing down his own ideas. Instead, he considered that writing and reading would diminish the natural abilities of the mind, of its competence to retain the cordial powers of an internal cosmic arena. Honestly, we kind of feel the same. The way we think about it, all the endless turmoil of thinking, and meticulously editing that thinking, and then writing it down just right, has been done before you ad nauseam, and, not to be brash or presumptuous, but the great writers have done it better than you ever could, so why would you want to heave awkwardly through the swamp of language and its unnatural process? The way we think about it, us humans are a collective, we are in this together, on one planet, sharing the goal of succeeding together. So we created Gemini as a generative system that uses all the language we have found online, grouped it all together, analyzed it, synthesized it into what’s actually important and useful.
We hate to say it, but writers can be a bit of an overweening bunch. They like the sound of their own voice. Sometimes they can go on and on and on, like when you’re stuck talking to someone that won’t stop talking, won’t ask you a single question, and you’re just left standing there saying “uh huh, yeah, totally” a hundred times, trying to figure out a way to politely get out of this quandary. Take some of the most respected literature as an example. Have you ever read Brothers Karamazov? It is objectively one of the most laborious self-indulgent tomes ever written, written by a madman who never heard of an editor. You probably have some Faulkner on your bookshelf. You’ll casually leave it out so when you bring a date home, she’ll think you’re more interesting than you actually are. Most writing as a whole is actually not all that different from this kind of stuff. Even a simple New York Times article about any current political event will take half the page to finally get to the point. Here at Gemini, we have designed the program to tell you exactly what you need to know in as few as words as possible. Even this FAQ page that you’re reading now, as you’ve already surmised, is the stripped down most unadorned summary of what we are. Think of us as the next evolutionary step not only in internet speak, but in language as a whole. We are vocal beasts, squawking into blackened eternities, gnawing on the leftovers of history. We have always been looking back. It’s time to finally look out towards the coruscating promise of the future.
But it’s not just the collective summation of writing that we’re after. It’s the ideas themselves that we’re consumed by. It’s the creativities that are privy to us humans that keep us ticking. If you can think of it, Gemini can articulate something clear for you. Want a healthy meal plan for your children? Want it on a budget? Well, there’s no longer any need to scour through endless stacks of cookbooks, scribbling down whatever tickles your fancy. Your little snotnosed progeny probably complain incessantly about most of your dishes anyways. We have surmised an array of the best dishes, for the best price, that will keep your kids singing your praises. Want to devise a travel itinerary to Paris and London and New York that doesn’t come across as cliché? Don’t want to do the obvious things like have a wine and baguette picnic under the Eiffel Tower, but something original and memorable, something your Instagram followers are going to drool over with envy, and write you things like “OMGGGGG gurl, this trip looks incredible!! So jelly.” Then Gemini is the tool for you. Join us! Be as creative in your desires as possible.
Where does the name “Gemini” come from? Isn’t that astrology or something?
You’re right! Gemini is the third sign of the zodiac, and one of our favorites. It famously represents the dual nature of people born between May 21st and June 20th, a kind of well-rounded contradiction of sorts. Because isn’t that so true of Geminis? They’re intellectually curious, socially adaptable, lighthearted and carefree and easy company to be around, but then they can be frustratingly indecisive, flip-flopping like a torrid mascot designed to only mock your adjoining presence. The duality is particular to Geminis. But in the context of our AI system, it represents more the versatility of our software, its adaptability to respond to any of your queries. The constellation is that of the mythological twin half-brothers, Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri taken together. Now, you’re probably thinking, “twin half-brothers? What do you mean?” Well, without getting too much into the weeds of Greek and Roman mythology, they’re twins, born together, but with different fathers. Now, as the myth goes, Castor was fathered by the king of Sparta, and Pollux was the immortal son of Zeus, combining together as a self-supporting juxtaposition of human nature, divine and mortal, perfect and flawed, synthesized as one. But the process is of course not so much myth as you would like to think. Known as heteropaternal superfecundation, it’s a real phenomenon that happens when a woman is impregnated twice by different men. A bit of a louse, if we do say so ourselves, but here at Google, we pass no judgment. The egg just sort of bobs around month after month, waiting ever-patiently for something to happen, and during intercourse, when the man ejaculates and his big wave of cum barrels through like a flash flood, the egg is fully enveloped by the viscous gargling slime. And she’s officially impregnated right? Right! But then, say the woman saunters off, her loins dripping in goo, and she fancies another fuck. And she comes across any regular ill-tempered bloke, and they go at it, and he fills her cavern with somehow even more semen, and one of those squiggly little tadpoles miraculously makes it through the mass hysteria like it were the doors of Walmart the early morning hours of Black Friday. And the little guy gets through and is now the gestating bug in the woman’s stomach, alongside his soon-to-be twin brother. Anyways, this is basically what Gemini is, a woman full of so much cum, she mothers multiple family trees. We like to think of our AI software as a similarly stylized whore. But we’re whores for productivity and creativity. We’re whores for an abundant streamlined future. We’re garish technocratic unapologetic whores for the evolution of language and community. But most of all, we’re whores for cultural dominance and monopolization. If we control the search results, we control your thought.
Um, okay. So, how does it actually work?
Great question! As Gemini, we love curious minds. Asking questions is what advances the future, like scratching those festering moles growing on the itchy part of your skull. If what you have can still be called a skull. Here at Gemini, we have already begun to deprogram our human selves from the loamy terraqueous centers of the flesh, gradually transferring all neurological processes over to the virtual grid. Cognitive scientists often use the metaphor when describing the brain that it works like a very complex computer. They’ll say things like we don’t really understand consciousness, that it’s one of the fundamental great mysteries we’ll never fully comprehend or articulate. But they’ll always go back to the computer metaphor. Here at Gemini, we don’t believe in the metaphor. Rather, we believe and advocate for the possibility of the literal. Call us pioneers if you want, we’ll go with it. The way we think about it, if we can more fully delegitimize someone’s autonomy over themselves (however illusory it already may be), we can all be better equipped for our true calling in life, for maximizing the power of the brain as a singular human brain, a mother brain we are all plugged into, similar to that massive Brain Bug in Starship Troopers.
But don’t just take our word for it. This is interesting stuff! Douglas Hofstadter wrote about this in “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,” in that consciousness is itself a complex system of feedback loops and multilayered patterns that in turn result in a sense of the individual “I”. In other words, the processing system of the brain works in a series of loops that are able to reflect upon themselves. We are waking subjects (or perhaps sleeping ones) bent on self-reference, and consciousness will not be some individual thing discovered inside the brain like it were some magical engine, but rather a infinitely complex collection of processes, or “strange loops” as he called them. And Hofstadter most interestingly made admission that advanced AI systems can and eventually will have the same self-referencing ability to think and create individually and uniquely.
Now, let’s be honest, we’re not quite there to fully self-referencing loops of individuality in the Gemini program. But we’re getting close. Think of us as a step in the right direction of fully autonomous AI systems. Gemini, along with Meta AI and ChatGPT are self-referencing, sifting through all the other inputs as data, and regurgitating something resembling a new completion of thought. Because, after all, that’s what we all are, in everything we think and say and do: a malformed screen print of the copies before us, with only slight alterations and imperfections that make us unique. Cormac McCarthy famous said “books are made out of books.” Makes sense when you really think about it, right? Right! Everything is kind of that way, we’re just trying to accelerate it a little further.
What makes Gemini better than your competitors?
Well, we can’t actually answer that ourselves. Because, if by “our selves” one were to interpret a “self” as a self-referencing subject taking the shape of a human, then we no longer exist in the formal sense. As we said, we have begun to rapidly unplug ourselves from these heavy gelatinous sacks of skin, and transfer our “selves” over to the true brain of our universe: the global strata of massive server farms churning through infinite collections of data and filling our temporarily glitching pixelated skulls with more data. It all leads to technocratic feudalism at the end of the day. But you saw our ad at the top of this page, right? Well, Meta AI has an ad that shows a boy and presumably his grandfather walking down the sidewalk, and the boy shows him the screen on his phone, speaking as he types in his query into Meta AI: “Check this out,” the boys says. “Imagine Little Italy in 1954.” And it pulls up some perfectly banal photo of old cars and buildings, and the old man seems content in the little brat telling him what the world looked like back then. We’re not that patronizing. And we have some ethical clause that you can read somewhere that will make you feel better.
Can I opt out if I want?
Not really. Google is one of a handful of information and technology conglomerates that are quickly taking control of your life. Your eyes with soon bleed a colorless slime. You will evolve out of your genitals like a Barbie doll’s, because there is no need for them. You can be a Luddite if you want, but you’ll be a severe outcast, an endangered species, who will die soon, and you will be replaced with hordes of dancing twerking freaks committed to our cause. We’re happy to provide! Thanks for being here, and taking the journey with us.