Google has pulled its AI, called Gemma, from its AI Studio following Senator Marsha Blackburn’s (R-TN) letter to CEO Sundar Pichai, saying the model created fake headlines and criminal allegations surrounding events that never occurred.
The company explained that Gemma can still be found in an application programming interface, or API.
“We’ve now seen reports of non-developers trying to use Gemma in AI Studio and ask it factual questions,” Google said. “We never intended this to be a consumer tool or model, or to be used this way. To prevent this confusion, access to Gemma is no longer available on AI Studio. It is still available to developers through the API.”
Google further explained that factual errors, called “hallucinations,” are “challenges across the AI industry, particularly smaller open models like Gemma.”
Last week, Blackburn accused the AI model of generating links to “fabricated news articles to support” the following story:
“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.”
Blackburn asserted, “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. “
“This is not a harmless ‘hallucination.’ It is an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI model,” she wrote.
