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 towards her.
In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Senator Marsha Blackburn — a Republican from Tennessee — stated 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 yr which was truly 1998,” Blackburn wrote. Whereas there are hyperlinks to information articles that supposedly assist these claims, she stated, “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 stated that in a current Senate Commerce listening to, Blackburn introduced up conservative activist Robby Starbuck’s lawsuit towards Google, through which Starbuck claims Google’s AI fashions (together with Gemma) generated defamatory claims about him being a “little one 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 situation and Google is “working exhausting to mitigate them.”
Blackburn’s letter argued that quite the opposite, that Gemma’s fabrications are “not a innocent ‘hallucination,’” however reasonably “an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI mannequin.”
President Donald Trump’s tech trade supporters have complained that “AI censorship” causes common chatbots to indicate a liberal bias, and Trump even signed an govt order banning “woke AI” earlier this yr.
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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 “Massive Lovely Invoice” — she echoed these complaints in her letter, writing that there’s “a constant sample of bias towards conservative figures demonstrated by Google’s AI programs.”
In a Friday evening publish on X, Google didn’t reference the specifics of Blackburn’s letter, however the firm stated it’s “seen studies of non-developers attempting to make use of Gemma in AI Studio and ask it factual questions.”
“We by no means meant this to be a shopper software or mannequin, or for use this manner,” the corporate stated. (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 atmosphere for AI-powered apps.)
Because of this, Google stated it’s eradicating Gemma from AI Studio whereas persevering with to make the fashions accessible through API.
TechCrunch has reached out to Google for extra remark.
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