[robwwilliams]

I can tell you why I just stopped using Gemini yesterday.

I was interested in getting simple summary data on the outcome of the recent US election and asked for an approximate breakdown of voting choices as a function age brackets of voters.

Gemini adamantly refused to provide these data. I asked the question four different ways. You would think voting outcomes were right up there with Tiananmen Square.

ChatGPT and Claude were happy to give me approximate breakdowns.

What I found interesting is that the patterns if voting by age are not all that different from Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace in 1968.

[unsignedint]

Gemini's guardrails are unnecessarily strict. As you mentioned, there's a topical restriction on election-related content, and another where it outright refuses to process images containing anything resembling a face. I initially thought Copilot was bad in this regard—it also censors election-related questions to some extent, but not as aggressively as Gemini. However, Gemini's defensiveness on certain topics is almost comical. That said, I still find it to be quite a capable model overall.