Google pulls Gemma from AI Studio after Senator Blackburn accuses model of defamation

Google pulls Gemma from AI Studio after Senator Blackburn accuses model of defamation

Google says it has eliminated Gemma from its AI Studio after a U.S. senator accused the AI model of fabricating accusations of sexual misconduct against her.

In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Senator Marsha Blackburn — a Republican from Tennessee — said that when Gemma was requested, “Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?” it responded by falsely claiming that during a 1987 state senate campaign, a state trooper alleged that Blackburn “pressured him to obtain prescription drugs for her and that the relationship involved non-consensual acts.”

“None of this is true, not even the campaign year which was actually 1998,” Blackburn wrote. While there are hyperlinks to news articles that supposedly help these claims, she said, “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.”

The letter also said that during a latest Senate Commerce listening to, Blackburn introduced up conservative activist Robby Starbuck’s lawsuit against Google, wherein Starbuck claims Google’s AI fashions (including Gemma) generated defamatory claims about him being a “child rapist” and “serial sexual abuser.”

As recounted in Blackburn’s letter, Google’s Vice President for Government Affairs and Public Policy Markham Erickson responded that hallucinations are a identified issue and Google is “working hard to mitigate them.”

Blackburn’s letter argued that on the opposite, that Gemma’s fabrications are “not a harmless ‘hallucination,’” however moderately “an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI model.”

President Donald Trump’s tech trade supporters have complained that “AI censorship” causes standard chatbots to point out a liberal bias, and Trump even signed an government order banning “woke AI” earlier this yr. Blackburn echoed those complaints in her letter, writing that there’s “a consistent pattern of bias against conservative figures demonstrated by Google’s AI systems.”

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That said, Blackburn hasn’t always backed the Trump administration’s tech insurance policies — she helped to strip a moratorium on state-level AI regulation from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

In a Friday night time publish on X, Google didn’t reference the specifics of Blackburn’s letter, however the company said it’s “seen reports of non-developers trying to use Gemma in AI Studio and ask it factual questions.”

“We never intended this to be a consumer tool or model, or to be used this way,” the company said. (Google promotes Gemma as a household of open, light-weight fashions that builders can combine into their very own merchandise, while AI Studio is the company’s web-based development surroundings for AI-powered apps.)

As a result, Google said it’s eradicating Gemma from AI Studio while persevering with to make the fashions obtainable by way of API.

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