The Kremlin has summoned the creators of a Russian AI chatbot after their tech created n@ked images of Vladimir Putin and got the country’s flag design wrong.
The developers of the chatbot Kandinsky have angered the Kremlin after it emerged that if users request an image of a ‘naked Putin’, the AI program will indeed generate embarrassing nude images of the Russian president.
One image created by the AI chatbot shows a naked Putin standing up and holding a wooden stick.
The AI chatbot also continually produced images of the Russian flag with the wrong colours, which Kremlin officials reportedly deemed a ‘mockery’ of the country
The developers of the Kandinsky chatbot, from the Russian banking firm Sberbank, as well as the head of Russian search engine Yandex have since been summoned to the Russian prosecutor’s office for creating such a ‘negative image of Russia’.
The AI developers were told they must tighten their security settings. But even after the developers made some changes to the program, it emerged users could still ask the chatbot to create naked pictures of Putin if they specified their request.
German Gref, the head of the chatbot developer Sberbank, told the Sun: ‘Both us and Yandex were immediately brought to the prosecutor’s office. We have a model for generating the Russian flag – well, it’s generative, it’s trying to improve it. It also drew domes from St Basil’s Cathedral on the flag.
‘The deputies considered this to be a mockery of our national flag. We immediately stopped certain things – it no longer generates state symbols, it generates a predetermined picture.’
Mr Gref said the AI chatbot model it has been using had lost 12 percent of its creativity and accuracy, meaning that the colours of the Russian flag generated by Kandinsky were wrong.
He said: ‘We haven’t been able to display the model for the last six months because we were tightening up the security settings. At the same time, the publicly available model lost 12 percent in creativity and accuracy.
‘We will have to go through this period. We need the help of the state in terms of leniency and understanding that we are like children here for now – we shouldn’t be judged too much.’
