Robby Starbuck, a conservative activist, has filed a new complaint against Meta, alleging that the social media giant’s AI chatbot defamed him.
The Meta chatbot wrongly accused Starbuck of being a “white nationalist” who was detained on January 6 and is facing a defamation lawsuit, according to Starbuck. According to the Delaware Superior Court lawsuit, the chatbot suggested that the right-wing influencer forfeit custody of his kids because he posed a risk to them.
The lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday, states that Mr. Starbuck was shocked to discover that Meta AI had made up these damaging and untrue allegations against him and was presenting them to Meta AI users as reality.
An AI chatbot was introduced by Meta in September 2023. In order to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and X’s Grok and Google Gemini, the business said on Tuesday that it will be creating a stand-alone chatbot based on its Llama AI model.
On August 5, 2024, an X user shared a screenshot of the AI chatbot’s purported record inaccuracies, alerting the anti-DEI activist to the issue. According to the lawsuit, the chatbot made up the facts that Starbucks was anti-vaccine, associated with the QAnon conspiracy group, and had been present during the January 6 incident.
In a post on X that same day, Starbuck tagged a number of Meta’s key executives and demanded that they address the matter. They also sent a legal cease-and-desist letter.
[Mark Zuckerberg] are you cool with your platform attacking people with entirely fictional stories?… What are you going to do about your lying AI?… There has to be accountability, Starbuck posted on X.
Three days later, on August 8, 2024, Michelle Visser, the attorney for Meta, sent an email to Starbuck’s attorney stating that the company is investigating the case and treating the matter seriously. The issue was deemed resolved on August 23 after Visser notified Starbucks’ attorney that the firm had taken the necessary precautions to stop its chatbot from making untrue statements about the influencer. But according to Starbucks, the chatbot still defames him today.
In response to a video that Starbuck shared on Tuesday, Joel Kaplan, the Chief Global Affairs Officer at Meta, described the circumstances as “unacceptable.”
It’s obvious that their AI shouldn’t function like this. Kaplan wrote on X that they apologized for the information it disclosed about you and that the solution they implemented failed to address the root cause.
According to a statement from a Meta representative, they have already released updates and will keep doing so as part of their ongoing efforts to enhance their models.
