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Incident 1248: Google's Bard, Gemini, and Gemma AI Systems Allegedly Generated Defamatory Claims About Activist Robby Starbuck, Prompting Lawsuit

Description: Conservative activist Robby Starbuck reportedly filed a defamation lawsuit against Google, alleging its Bard, Gemini, and Gemma AI systems generated false statements linking him to sexual assault and extremist activity. Starbuck claims the outputs caused reputational harm and sought over $15 million in damages. Google acknowledged the hallucinations as known LLM behavior and stated it works to minimize such inaccuracies. See also Incident 1247.
Editor Notes: Timeline notes: The earliest reported instances of purportedly false outputs appear to have occurred in 2023, with additional alleged misstatements by Google's AI systems reported in 2025. This incident ID uses 10/22/2025, which is the publication date of The Wall Street Journal report, as the incident date.

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Alleged: Google , Google Bard , Gemma AI and Gemini developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Robby Starbuck and Epistemic integrity.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Google Bard , Gemma AI and Gemini

Incident Stats

Incident ID
1248
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2025-10-22
Editors
Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

+1
Activist Robby Starbuck Sues Google Over Claims of False AI Info
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Activist Robby Starbuck Sues Google Over Claims of False AI Info

Activist Robby Starbuck Sues Google Over Claims of False AI Info

wsj.com

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Activist Robby Starbuck Sues Google Over Claims of False AI Info
wsj.com · 2025

Conservative activist Robby Starbuck filed a defamation lawsuit against Google alleging its artificial-intelligence tools falsely connected Starbuck to sexual-assault claims and to a white nationalist.

Starbuck said he became aware of the i…

Variants

A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
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