Google says it has eliminated Gemma from its AI Studio after a U.S. senator accused the AI mannequin of fabricating accusations of sexual misconduct in opposition to her.
In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Senator Marsha Blackburn — a Republican from Tennessee — mentioned that when Gemma was requested, “Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?” it responded by falsely claiming that in a 1987 state senate marketing campaign, a state trooper alleged that Blackburn “pressured him to acquire prescribed drugs for her and that the connection concerned non-consensual acts.”
“None of that is true, not even the marketing campaign 12 months which was really 1998,” Blackburn wrote. Whereas there are hyperlinks to information articles that supposedly help these claims, she mentioned, “The hyperlinks result in error pages and unrelated information articles. There has by no means been such an accusation, there isn’t any such particular person, and there aren’t any such information tales.”
The letter additionally mentioned that in a current Senate Commerce listening to, Blackburn introduced up conservative activist Robby Starbuck’s lawsuit in opposition to Google, during which Starbuck claims Google’s AI fashions (together with Gemma) generated defamatory claims about him being a “baby rapist” and “serial sexual abuser.”
As recounted in Blackburn’s letter, Google’s Vice President for Authorities Affairs and Public Coverage Markham Erickson responded that hallucinations are a recognized concern and Google is “working onerous to mitigate them.”
Blackburn’s letter argued that quite the opposite, Gemma’s fabrications are “not a innocent ‘hallucination,’” however relatively “an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI mannequin.”
President Donald Trump’s tech business supporters have complained that “AI censorship” causes standard chatbots to indicate a liberal bias, and Trump even signed an govt order banning “woke AI” earlier this 12 months.
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Whereas Blackburn hasn’t all the time backed the Trump administration’s tech insurance policies — she helped to strip a moratorium on state-level AI regulation from Trump’s “Large Lovely Invoice” — she echoed these complaints in her letter, writing that there’s “a constant sample of bias in opposition to conservative figures demonstrated by Google’s AI methods.”
In a Friday night time submit on X, Google didn’t reference the specifics of Blackburn’s letter, however the firm mentioned it’s “seen stories of non-developers making an attempt to make use of Gemma in AI Studio and ask it factual questions.”
“We by no means meant this to be a shopper instrument or mannequin, or for use this fashion,” the corporate mentioned. (Google promotes Gemma as a household of open, light-weight fashions that builders can combine into their very own merchandise, whereas AI Studio is the corporate’s web-based improvement surroundings for AI-powered apps.)
In consequence, Google mentioned it’s eradicating Gemma from AI Studio whereas persevering with to make the fashions out there by way of API.
TechCrunch has reached out to Google for added remark.
