Lawsuit Accuses Google’s AI of Fabricating News Articles That Never Existed
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Conservative activist Robby Starbuck filed a defamation lawsuit against Google on Wednesday after the company’s AI allegedly generated links to non-existent news articles falsely claiming he had been accused of sexual assault and other crimes.
According to Starbuck, who announced his lawsuit in a viral video on Wednesday, Google’s AI cited a number of non-existent news articles from mainstream media outlets – including Mediaite, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, the New York Post, Salon, and the Daily Beast – to claim the activist had been accused of various imaginary crimes.
In one case, according to Starbuck, Google’s AI claimed he had been a “person of interest” in a murder case when he was just two years old.
“For each source, Google’s AI provides a URL, giving the impression that these are real news articles with headlines like, ‘Robby Starbuck Responds to Murder Accusations,'” he said. “The only way to discover that these URLs are fake is to click on them.”
Starbuck continued, “None of these articles or claims are true. I was never accused of killing anyone, and I certainly wasn’t accused of murder in 1991 when I was two years old… But if you aren’t familiar with my full biography or my age, then you’d have no reason to doubt anything Google’s AI was saying.”
Google’s AI also allegedly told users “on a regular basis” that Starbuck “was credibly accused of sexual assault.”
“To be very clear again, I have never been accused of anything like this, and these allegations are entirely invented by Google’s AI,” Starbuck said:
Once again, there is a link to a fake Rolling Stone article. This seems designed to make their lies as credible as possible by stating that the accuser had provided a contemporaneous account of the sexual assault and that a major media outlet reported it. Again, and I can’t stress this enough, nothing that Google said here is true and no such article from Rolling Stone exists. And, as you can see here, Google’s AI claims that numerous other outlets including Salon and the Daily Beast have also reported that I have sexually harassed women. They’re saying it’s a widely covered scandal […]
At one point, Google’s AI even stated that my name was in Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs, citing imaginary articles in the New York Post and also one from Mediaite, that also says I was suspended by Daily Wire over sexual harassment allegations, which would be hard for Daily Wire to do since I don’t work for the lovely people at the Daily Wire […]
The articles Google cites once again literally do not exist. But the most serious, evil, and vile false claim that Google’s AI made is that I have been credibly accused of raping and abusing children, which once again obviously never happened. When I saw this, I immediately called my lawyers and I said we need to file suit as soon as we possibly can. This is a line Google can’t uncross. This harm they cannot undo.
According to Starbuck, Google’s AI also accused him of working as a porn actor, defrauding his business partners, engaging in “black ops tactics,” stalking his ex-wife, even though I don’t have an ex-wife,” taking part in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots, and supporting the Ku Klux Klan.
“I warned Google for 2 years. They refused to fix it,” Starbuck told Mediaite in a statement, adding that he had even been approached by people in public “who had read” the falsehoods generated by Google’s AI “and believed it.”
In a statement to the New York Post, a Google spokesperson blamed “hallucinations” for any falsehoods spread by its AI.
“Hallucinations are a well known issue for all LLMs, which we disclose and work hard to minimize,” they said, adding, “If you’re creative enough, you can prompt a chatbot to say something misleading.”
