admin
Robby Starbuck has taken the fight to Big Tech, filing a defamation suit after Google’s AI systems allegedly invented grotesque accusations about him, including claims of sexual assault and other crimes. This is not a garden-variety glitch — Starbuck says Bard, Gemini and Gemma output fabricated news links and labeled him things no person should ever be called without evidence.
According to the complaint, Google’s bots didn’t just make vague errors; they allegedly attached fake URLs and quoted nonexistent stories from reputable outlets to give the smears an air of legitimacy. Starbuck points to outrageous examples, like an AI declaring he was a “person of interest” in a 1991 murder when he was only two years old and repeatedly asserting he’d been credibly accused of sexual assault. Those are the kinds of fabrications that can ruin a life and invite real-world danger.
The suit was filed in Delaware Superior Court and seeks substantial damages — Starbuck is pursuing at least $15 million, saying the false outputs reached millions of people and harmed his reputation and safety. This is more than a personal grievance; it’s an attempt to hold a trillion-dollar company accountable for technology that disseminates lies as if they were facts. The stakes are high, and the money figure reflects that reality.
Google has admitted that large language models can “hallucinate,” but vague tech-speak won’t cut it when people’s lives are being smeared. The company has taken steps—pulling Gemma from its public AI Studio after other high-profile false accusations emerged—but that kind of reactive tinkering is not a substitute for real accountability or safeguards. Conservatives who have been warning about bias and unchecked power in Silicon Valley see a pattern, and casual excuses about “hallucinations” don’t restore a tarnished name.
Starbuck has already litigated similar issues with Meta earlier this year and reportedly settled, showing that these AI defamation problems are not unique to one firm but endemic across the industry. When companies promise to “improve” systems while continuing to churn out defamatory content about outspoken conservatives, it’s reasonable to suspect both negligence and ideological blind spots in how these models are trained and deployed. The legal playbook is now being tested against the power of the platform.
This lawsuit is about far more than one man’s reputation; it’s about whether private tech oligopolies get to manufacture reality and weaponize it against political opponents. If AI can invent scurrilous allegations and back them up with fake “news” links, it can be used to shape narratives, sway opinions, and — in a close contest — change the outcome of elections. Americans who value truth and free speech should be alarmed that unaccountable algorithms can alter public perception with no meaningful recourse.
Courts and lawmakers must act to set clear liability rules and force transparency about training data, prompts, and attribution so these systems cannot casually fabricate lives into ruin. Starbuck’s suit could set a crucial precedent: either tech companies will be forced to clean up their systems or they will continue to outsource reputational ruin to opaque models. This is the kind of test where conservative principles—personal responsibility, due process, and rule of law—demand a decisive response.
Americans should stand with anyone targeted by manufactured AI smears and demand that companies like Google stop treating defamation as an acceptable side effect of “innovation.” Congress must step in with honest oversight, and citizens should press their representatives to protect reputations, elections, and basic fairness from being hijacked by Silicon Valley’s elites. If we don’t, the next time an AI invents a smear it could be aimed at any one of us — and by then it will be too late to undo the damage.
