Comment by GuB-42

The thing is that if a human draws an Asian Viking, he has to do it with intent. It is neither historically accurate nor matching popular culture. It doesn't have to do with whiteness, drawing an Asian Kenyan warrior, or an Asian Apache would be exactly the same thing.

By drawing an Asian Viking, you are passing a message. Or you may be expressing an art style, as you say. I accept the idea that Gemini style is multi-cultural, realism and conventions be damned, but if we attribute this kind of intent to an AI, we could also say that the liberties it takes with intellectual property and plagiarism is also intentional, because that how we would judge a human artist doing that.

The standard for a neutral human artist would be to draw a Viking as a blond white guy, with or without the horned helm depending if historical realism matters more than popular culture, and an Italian Plumber as not Mario, because a human understands that if want one wanted Mario, he would have said "Mario" and not "an Italian Plumber". Current AIs on the other hand just draw images similar to how they are tagged, with some out-of-context race mixing because reinforcement learning has taught it that it has to make people less white, but unlike people it isn't able to understand when it is relevant (ex: a university professor), and when it is not (ex: a Viking warrior).