{"id":6794,"date":"2025-11-18T17:31:05","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T17:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/google-chatbot-accuses-senator-crime\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T17:31:05","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T17:31:05","slug":"google-chatbot-accuses-senator-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/google-chatbot-accuses-senator-crime\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Pulls Down AI Chatbot After It Accuses Senator of Terrible Crime"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We\u2019re well into the AI boom, and AI chatbots still suffer from the small problem of being serial liars.<\/p>\n

Public figures are still finding that out the hard way. Late last month, Republican senator Marsha Blackburn tore into Google after its AI model, Gemma, falsely claimed that Blackburn had been accused of rape when asked if there were any such allegations against her.<\/p>\n

The AI\u2019s answer wasn\u2019t a simple \u201cyes,\u201d but an entire fabricated story. It confidently explained that, during her 1987 campaign for Tennessee state senator, a state trooper alleged \u201cthat she pressured him to obtain prescription drugs for her and that the relationship involved non-consensual acts.\u201d<\/p>\n

The compelling narrative would be enough to fool someone who wasn\u2019t familiar with AI\u2019s hallucinatory habit, but Blackburn claims Gemma also generated fake links to made up news articles to back it all up, though clicking them led to dead ends.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not a harmless \u2018hallucination,’\u201d Blackburn wrote<\/a> in an official statement. \u201cIt is an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI model.\u201d She demanded that Google \u201cshut it down until you can control it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s response, tellingly, was to pull the plug. In a statement<\/a>, the company argued that the Gemma model was intended to be used by developers and was never intended to be a \u201cconsumer tool or model,\u201d so it yanked it from AI Studio, its public platform for accessing its suite of AI models. (Google also rebuffed Blackburn\u2019s claims that its AIs exhibited a \u201cpattern of bias against conservative figures\u201d by admitting to the far larger problem of hallucinations being inherent to LLM technology itself.)<\/p>\n

As a senator, Blackburn piled pressure on Google that most of us wouldn\u2019t be able to, but her complaints prefigure enormous legal quagmires in the future, the seeds of <\/strong>which are being planted as we speak.<\/p>\n

This summer, a Minnesota solar firm sued Google for defamation<\/a> after the search engine giant\u2019s notoriously shoddy AI Overviews falsely claimed that the business was being investigated by regulators and had been accused of deceptive business practices, backing these claims with bogus citations. The firm, Wolf Solar Electric, claimed that it lost business as a result of these hallucinations. According to recent reporting<\/a> from the New York Times<\/em>, the suit is one of at least six defamation cases filed in the US over content generated by AI models.\u00a0<\/p>\n

AI hallucinations, at least for the time being, aren\u2019t going away<\/a>, meaning that chatbots\u2019 wayward responses will continue to expose AI companies to litigation as courts slowly make sense of what to do with them. In the order of operations, they\u2019re legal problems first, technical problems second. Which raises the question: who will solve them?<\/p>\n

Peter Henderson, a professor at Princeton University, argued to The Economist<\/em><\/a> <\/em>that the question of whether AI companies can be held liable for these false generations will almost certainly end up before the Supreme Court.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Putting your finger to the wind will give conflicting answers on how that might turn out. On the one hand, The Economist <\/em>notes that a recent defamation suit by a radio station against OpenAI was dismissed by a court in Georgia, after the judge determined that OpenAI could not be held liable because it provided \u201cextensive warnings\u201d about its bot\u2019s proclivity for errors.<\/p>\n

Moreover, AI firms could also benefit from the standing interpretation of a law called Section 230, which has been a boon to social media companies by in effect ruling that internet sites aren\u2019t liable for the information spread on their platforms, since they aren\u2019t the publishers of that content.<\/p>\n

But does that apply to generative AI, since the AIs themselves are generating the content and not merely resharing it? In a 2023 case against Google, Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch said that, no, the protection doesn\u2019t apply to AI generated content. And so if Section 230 fails, The Economist <\/em>warns, AI developers may argue that chatbots have a right to free speech. After all, existing legal precedent holds that it isn\u2019t just humans that enjoys this sacred right enshrined in the Constitution, but corporations, too.<\/p>\n

More on AI:<\/strong> CEO Accused of Asking ChatGPT About Something Absolutely Wild<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Google Pulls Down AI Chatbot After It Accuses Senator of Terrible Crime<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We\u2019re well into the AI boom, and AI chatbots still suffer from the small problem of being serial liars. Public figures are still finding that out the hard way. Late…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6794\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}