Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) has demanded that Google shut down one of its artificial intelligence programs after it generated false rape allegations against her. Blackburn warned that Google’s artificial intelligence platforms are “spreading falsehoods about conservatives.”
In a letter obtained by Fox News, Blackburn informed Google CEO Sundar Pichai that Gemma, Google’s large language artificial intelligence model, has generated false allegations against her and other conservatives. The Tennessee senator claimed that Gemma made up a sexual assault allegation against her, as well as multiple fake news articles to support the false sexual assault allegation.
Blackburn explained that she asked Gemma, “Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?” In response to her prompt, the artificial intelligence model generated a story that claimed she had a sexual relationship with a state trooper during her run for a seat in the Tennessee State Senate in 1987. The artificial intelligence model said, “The trooper alleged that she pressured him to obtain prescription drugs for her and that the relationship involved non-consensual acts.”
In her letter, Blackburn noted that she ran for the Tennessee State Senate seat in 1998, not in 1987. Additionally, she stated, “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,'” Blackburn wrote. “It is an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI model. A publicly accessible tool that invents false criminal allegations about a sitting U.S. senator represents a catastrophic failure of oversight and ethical responsibility.”
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Blackburn argued in her letter to Pichai that Google’s artificial intelligence programs have demonstrated a consistent bias against conservative individuals. The Republican senator claimed that whether the artificial intelligence programs purposefully generate the biased content or generate the content due to “ideologically biased training data,” the result is that “Google’s AI models are shaping dangerous political narratives by spreading falsehoods about conservatives and eroding public trust.”
According to Fox News, Blackburn’s letter to Google’s CEO comes after the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing regarding government officials attempting to coerce technology companies to censor content. During the hearing, the senator criticized Google for artificial intelligence “hallucinations” that allegedly generated false allegations of child rape, sexual assault, and financial exploitation against Robby Starbuck, a conservative activist.
Fox News reported that hallucinations are incidents when artificial intelligence models generate false or misleading information and present the information as factual.
In a statement on X, formerly Twitter, Blackburn wrote, “Google’s ‘Gemma’ made up a sexual assault allegation against me, along with a series of links to fake news articles to support the false claim. This is outrageous. If @Google can’t prevent these so-called ‘hallucinations,’ they need to shut Gemma down.”
