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

Google said it removed Gemma from its AI studio after a US senator accused the AI ​​model of fabricating sexual misconduct accusations against her.

in message Speaking to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Senator Marsha Blackburn – a Republican from Tennessee – said that when Gemma was asked: “Was Marsha Blackburn accused of rape?” It responded by falsely claiming that during the 1987 state Senate campaign, a state trooper alleged that Blackburn “pressured him to obtain prescription drugs 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 links to news articles that are supposed to support the allegations, she said, “The links lead to error pages and irrelevant news articles. There has never been such an accusation, there is no such person, and there are no such news stories.”

The letter also said that during a recent Senate hearing, Blackburn brought up the issue A lawsuit filed by conservative activist Robbie Starbuck against Googlein which Starbuck claims that Google’s AI models (including Gemma) generated defamatory claims about him as a “pedophile” and “serial sexual assaulter”.

As noted in Blackburn’s letter, Google’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, Markham Erickson, responded that hallucinations are a known problem and that Google is “working hard to mitigate them.”

On the contrary, Gemma’s slurs are “not a harmless ‘hallucination’ but rather ‘an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned artificial intelligence model’,” Blackburn’s letter said.

Tech industry supporters have done just that for President Donald Trump He complained that “AI censorship” It causes popular chatbots to show liberal, even Trumpian, bias Signing an executive order banning “woke AI” Earlier this year. Blackburn echoed these complaints in her letter, writing that there was a “consistent pattern of bias against conservative figures demonstrated by Google’s AI systems.”

However, Blackburn has not always supported, but rather helped, the Trump administration’s tech policies Eliminate the moratorium on regulation of artificial intelligence at the state level From Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

in Friday night post on XGoogle did not detail the details of Blackburn’s letter, but the company said it had “seen reports of non-developers trying to use Gemma in AI Studio and asking her realistic questions.”

“We never intended this to be a consumer tool or model, or for it to be used in this way,” the company said. (Google is promoting Gemma as A family of open and lightweight models Which developers can integrate into their own products, while AI Studio is the company’s web-based development environment for AI-powered applications.)

As a result, Google said it will remove Gemma from AI Studio while continuing to make models available via the API.