HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

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

October 22, 2025

Conservative activist Robby Starbuck filed a defamation lawsuit against Google, alleging its AI systems Bard, Gemini, and Gemma generated false statements linking him to sexual assault and extremist activity. The outputs reportedly caused reputational harm, with damages sought exceeding $15 million.

Google acknowledged the hallucinations as known issues in Large Language Models (LLMs) and is working towards minimizing such inaccuracies. This incident highlights the importance of trustworthy AI governance and prevention mechanisms, a key focus area for Project Cerebellum.

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For those interested, this incident aligns with the HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM's Map function, demonstrating the need for careful governance of AI systems.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
google
Alleged developer
google
Alleged harmed parties
robby-starbuck, epistemic-integrity

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1248

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.