This is no longer a hypothetical chin-stroker for a university ethics panel. We are now grappling with some profound AI liability issues, and the case of Robby Starbuck versus Google is dragging this messy conversation out of the server farms and into the courtroom. The core question is staggeringly simple and fiendishly complex: if an AI defames you, who do you sue? This isn’t just about one conservative activist’s spat with a tech behemoth; it’s a battle for the future of digital accountability.
What Is a Lie When the Liar Isn’t Human?
Before we dive into the legal mire, it’s crucial to understand what these generative AI models actually are. Forget the sci-fi image of a conscious digital brain. Think of it more as a supremely sophisticated parrot, or a dream machine for language. These Large Language Models (LLMs) like Google’s Gemini have been trained on a truly biblical amount of text and data from the internet. They don’t ‘know’ facts; they predict the next most likely word in a sequence based on the patterns they’ve absorbed.
This predictive power is what allows them to write an email, a poem, or a piece of code. But it’s also their Achilles’ heel. When a model doesn’t have a solid, pattern-based answer, it doesn’t stop and say, “I don’t know.” Instead, it improvises. It generates a plausible-sounding string of words that looks right but is completely fabricated. In the industry, they have a sanitised, almost quaint term for this: ‘hallucinations’. It’s a dangerously misleading word. This isn’t a whimsical daydream; it’s a system generating confident, declarative, and sometimes reputation-destroying falsehoods.
The problem with these ‘hallucinations’ is that they are not bugs to be fixed, but an inherent part of how the current generation of AI works. It’s a feature, not a glitch. The system is designed to fill in the blanks, and sometimes it fills them with poison. This reality is at the heart of the growing generative AI risks that companies are now facing.
Case Study: When the Algorithm Becomes an Accuser
Enter Robby Starbuck. A conservative activist and former congressional candidate, Starbuck filed a bombshell lawsuit against Google, seeking $15 million in damages. According to the lawsuit, first reported by Fox Business, Google’s AI models—including Bard (now Gemini)—didn’t just get a few facts wrong. They allegedly accused him of heinous crimes, including child rape and murder. The suit claims Gemini even stated its falsehoods about Starbuck were “shown to 2,843,917 unique users”.
Imagine typing your name into a search engine and seeing it linked to such monstrous acts. This is the new frontier of digital reputation management, where the threat isn’t just a rogue blogger or a malicious tweet, but a trusted, mainstream corporate tool that is, for all intents and purposes, making things up. Starbuck argues this is defamation, plain and simple, and that Google is the publisher. He stated, “There’s serious danger here… Right now, the AI believes it’s OK to harm humans and defame them as long as it’s in the interest of how it was programmed.”
Google’s response is telling. A spokesperson told Fox Business that many of the claims relate to “hallucinations” in its 2023 Bard system, framing it as a “well-known issue for all LLMs” which they “disclose and work hard to minimise”. It’s a classic tech response: acknowledge the problem exists in the abstract, frame it as an industry-wide challenge, and promise you’re working on it. But does that absolution wash when the ‘hallucination’ could destroy a person’s life? Where does corporate responsibility begin?
Can a 1996 Law Govern a 2024 AI?
This brings us to the sacred cow of internet law: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This piece of legislation states that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” It’s the law that turned tech platforms into trillion-dollar empires, by giving them immunity from lawsuits over user-generated content.
But the Starbuck case throws a massive spanner in the works. Is Gemini’s output “information provided by another”? It’s not, is it? The content is generated by Google’s own proprietary system. It’s not a user post or a third-party link. It’s the platform itself speaking. This is the legal tightrope Google is now walking. If courts decide that AI-generated content is created by the company, not a ‘user’, the entire liability shield of Section 230 could crumble.
This is the big one. A ruling against Google would set a precedent that could upend the business model for generative AI. If companies are legally responsible for every word their AI utters, the risk calculus changes dramatically. The era of “move fast and break things” might be replaced by “move slowly and lawyer up.” This is the most significant challenge to Section 230 reform we’ve seen yet, not from politicians in Washington, but from the raw output of the technology itself.
The Impossible Task of Content Moderation
For years, platforms have struggled with content moderation at scale. They’ve hired armies of moderators and built AI filters to police the tsunami of user content. But how do you moderate yourself? How does a company like Google police a system that can generate an almost infinite amount of content, some of which might be libellous, in real-time?
The old model of notice-and-takedown—where a platform removes content after being notified it’s illegal—feels archaic here. By the time the defamatory statement is discovered, the damage may already be done, potentially seen by millions, as Starbuck’s lawsuit alleges. This presents an enormous challenge for digital reputation management. Individuals and businesses are no longer just fighting trolls and misinformation from external sources; they are now potentially battling the very architecture of the information ecosystem.
The strategies for dealing with this are still being written, but they likely involve a combination of:
– Proactive Monitoring: Individuals with public profiles may need to regularly ‘prompt’ AI systems about themselves to see what fabrications are being spun up.
– Legal Challenges: As we see with Starbuck, lawsuits will become a primary tool to force accountability and establish legal guardrails.
– Pressure for Transparency: Demanding that tech companies provide more transparency about how their models are trained and what safeguards are in place to prevent defamatory outputs.
But let’s be honest, these are reactive measures. The core AI liability issues remain unresolved. We are building systems with emergent behaviours we don’t fully understand or control, and releasing them into the wild with little more than a disclaimer in the terms of service.
The Reckoning Is Coming
The Starbuck vs. Google lawsuit is more than just a legal skirmish. It’s a symptom of a much larger disease: our legal and ethical frameworks have been utterly lapped by the pace of technological development. The glib talk of ‘hallucinations’ from Silicon Valley boardrooms sounds very different when it manifests as a false accusation of a horrific crime attached to your name.
This isn’t about stifling innovation. It’s about demanding that the architects of our new digital reality take some responsibility for their creations. We wouldn’t accept a car manufacturer saying, “Well, our self-driving cars sometimes ‘hallucinate’ and drive into walls, but that’s a known issue.” We demand safety standards, accountability, and liability. Why should the world’s most powerful information tools be any different?
This case, and the many others that will inevitably follow, will force a reckoning. It will compel courts, legislators, and the tech giants themselves to answer the fundamental question that’s been looming for years. When an algorithm lies, who pays the price?
What do you think? Should companies like Google be held to the same standard as a newspaper for what their AI publishes? Or does the unpredictable nature of this technology demand a completely new legal category? The answers we find will define the next chapter of the internet.
