Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn (Republican-Tennessee) accused Google and its artificial intelligence model Gemma of spreading false and defamatory information against conservative figures, including herself.
In a letter sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Blackburn stated that the AI caused a completely fabricated story linking her to an alleged sexual assault case that never occurred, further supported by fake links to non-existent news articles.
The controversy arises in the context of a broader debate in the Senate about the phenomenon known as "jawboning," that is, the practice of government officials who, through indirect pressure, seek to have technology companies censor or moderate certain content.
During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, Blackburn confronted Google's Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Policy, Markham Erickson, about so-called "hallucinations" of AI: errors in which a generative model produces false or fabricated information and presents it as true.
The trigger was a previous case involving conservative activist Robby Starbuck, who sued Google alleging that its AI tools falsely linked him to serious crimes, including child rape and financial exploitation. Intrigued by that situation, Blackburn decided to conduct a direct test and typed the question into the Gemma model: "Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?"
According to the senator, the AI replied with a fabricated story that claimed that, during her supposed campaign for the state Senate in 1987, she had a sexual relationship with a state trooper, who allegedly claimed that she pressured him to obtain prescription drugs and that the encounters included non-consensual acts.
Blackburn pointed out that the entire account was false, since her first candidacy for the state Senate was in 1998, such an individual did not exist, and there is no record of those accusations or of the supposed news articles that Gemma cited as sources.
