is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.
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Google filed a motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit brought by anti-corporate diversity activist Robby Starbuck, who claimed Google’s AI falsely associated him with sexual assault allegations and a white nationalist.
Starbuck’s claims against Google came after he filed a similar lawsuit against Meta, whose AI he claimed falsely asserted that he’d participated in the January 6th riot at the US Capitol. But Meta settled that lawsuit in August and even hired Starbuck as an advisor to help address “ideological and political bias” in its AI chatbot, The Wall Street Journal reported. The outlet noted last month that so far, no US court had awarded damages for defamation by an AI chatbot.
Starbuck is seeking $15 million in damages from Google. But the company says in its filing that his claims simply represent his “misuse of developer tools to induce hallucinations.” Starbuck doesn’t identify what prompts he used to generate the outputs at issue, according to Google, or any actual person who was misled by the alleged claims. Starbuck did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Google, of course, could eventually choose a similar route to Meta to resolve the claims. But at least for now, it’s choosing to fight them in court.