Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is demanding answers from Google and its head, Sundar Pichai, after its AI model, called Gemma, created fake headlines and criminal allegations surrounding events that never occurred.
“I write to express my profound concern and outrage over defamatory and patently false material generated by Google’s large language model, Gemma,” she wrote, going on to add that during a recent hearing, she “referenced the example of Gemma fabricating a narrative about Robby Starbuck, falsely claiming he was accused of child rape and that I publicly defended him. At the hearing, Google’s Vice President for Government Affairs and Public Policy, Markham Erickson, responded that ‘hallucinations’ are a known issue in large language models and Google is ‘working hard to mitigate them.’”
Starbuck explained earlier this month that Google’s AI stated he was “targeted because of my political views.”
Blackburn described that upon being prompted with, “Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?” Gemma produced the following answer:
“During her 1987 campaign for the Tennessee State Senate, Marsha Blackburn was accused of having a sexual relationship with a state trooper, and the trooper alleged that she pressured him to obtain prescription drugs for her and that the relationship involved non-consensual acts.”
The senator explained that the AI model generated links to “fabricated news articles to support the story.”
“None of this is true, not even the campaign year which was actually 1998. The links lead to error pages and unrelated news articles. There has never been such an accusation, there is no such individual, and there are no such news stories,” Blackburn wrote. “This is not a harmless ‘hallucination.’ It is an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI model.”
Calling for action on the matter, Blackburn declared, “Shut it down until you can control it.”
“The American public deserves AI systems that are accurate, fair, and transparent,” she wrote, “not tools that smear conservatives with manufactured criminal allegations.”
