Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Tuesday said that Google is similar to a “disobedient child” that constantly pushes for more censorship and bias against conservatives despite the backlash against the big tech platform.
“It’s like a disobedient child. They’ll push and push and push and then you slap their hand, and they’re content with the hand slap, but they go back to pushing and try to continue to push out and get their way, and Google has seemed to do that,” Blackburn told Breitbart News in an interview.
The Tennessee senator, who is running for governor of Tennessee, spoke to Breitbart News after she accused Google of defaming her with “patently false material” generated by the big tech platform’s Gemma AI. Google subsequently pulled Gemma AI from its AI studio platform after she documented how the company’s AI had accused her of sexual assault.
Blackburn wrote in a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, “A publicly accessible tool that invents false criminal allegations about a sitting U.S. Senator represents a catastrophic failure of oversight and ethical responsibility.”
During a recent Senate Commerce Committee hearing Blackburn brought up to a Google government affairs executive that the company had generated reportedly defamatory statements about conservative activist Robby Starbuck being a “child rapist” and a “serial sexual abuser.” In response, Markham Erickson, the Google vice president for government affairs and public policy, admitted that hallucinations are a known issue for the company and the company is working to limit them.
Blackburn has highlighted how Google’s AI systems have demonstrated a pattern of bias against conservatives.
The Volunteer State conservative further explained how the big tech platform acts like a child that constantly pushes to get away with more censorship and bias against conservatives.
She continued, “They have pushed against the boundaries, and continue to try to push those boundaries out so that they can be more reckless and how they are programming these platforms and Google Search and the Google Ad stack, you look at all of these areas where we have had issues, the preferencing that you see in Google Search, and the difference that search on Google looks compared to Bing or other search engines, what it yields. And so what they’ve done is to bias their AI platform against conservatives. And, we now have one of their senior executives who at admitted it is biased and that it hallucinates and therefore it has problems and makes up these fictitious accounts of occurrences that never occurred.”
She added that big tech platforms cannot simply try to get closer to the Trump White House to avoid accountability.
“I think that some of these tech platforms are realizing that you can’t go say, ‘Hey, we’re going to cozy up to the White House and then escape any type of responsibility or any type of accountability when it comes to Congress.’ You have got to clean your ACT UP, and we are watching, and we’re going to hold them to account,” she argued. “You cannot have an AI search that is going to yield fictitious results. And you think about what this does to individuals, to their reputation, you think about what it does to the conservative movement. You think about the harm that it does… people are doing research, and they have these fictitious accounts that come up, and you you can’t do that. It is liable. It is slander, and people have a right of recourse for these occurrences.”
Blackburn said she is working with White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks on how to ensure AI protects children’s safety and conservatives’ free speech while ensuring there are light-touch guardrails.
“We need to protect kids. We need to protect creators. Creators have a constitutional right to benefit from their creations. It’s an Article One, Section Eight, Clause Eight [part of the Constitution], and so all of our innovators, people that hold patents and copyrights and trademarks that belongs to them and they have the right to benefit. The third thing is we need to protect consumers and conservatives. This bias against conservatives needs to stop.”
