Google has removed one of its artificial intelligence models from a popular developer platform after a US senator accused it of creating criminal charges against him.
Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee claimed that Gemma, the big-talking Google model, fabricated the sexual misconduct allegations when she was asked if Marsha Blackburn had been accused of sexual assault.
The response produced by Gemma apparently included fake links to non-existent news articles about a 1987 incident involving “non-consensual acts” with a state trooper.
In a letter to Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, Senator Blackburn claimed the response was part of a “consistent pattern of bias against conservatives” and called for the AI tool to be shut down.
He wrote in this letter: “The scope of this problem is much wider than technical errors, and the consequences of these so-called “illusions” cannot be exaggerated.
“This is not a harmless ‘illusion’. It is an offensive act produced and distributed by an artificial intelligence model owned by Google. A publicly available tool that concocts false criminal allegations about a sitting United States Senator represents a catastrophic failure of oversight and moral responsibility.”
Google responded by saying that illusions are a known problem with smaller open-source AI models like Gemma, and that it is committed to minimizing the problem.
The US tech giant also said that Gemma was built specifically for artificial intelligence developers and researchers, and not for the kind of inquiries Senator Blackburn was referring to.
In a series of posts for X, Google wrote: “They are not intended to be of real help or for consumer use… Developers and researchers test their boundaries, which includes identifying bugs and providing feedback.”
We’ve now seen reports of non-developers trying to use Gemma in AI Studio and asking it real questions. “We never intended this to be a consumer tool or model or to be used that way.”
The tool remains available to developers through the Application Programming Interface (API) but is no longer available in Google’s AI Studio.
