AI Libel Suit by Conservative Activist Robby Starbuck Against Meta Settles
The Wall Street Journal (Joseph De Avila) reports:
Under the settlement, Starbuck will advise Meta, the owner of Facebook, on efforts to curb what they describe as political bias in its AI tools…. During a CNBC interview Friday, Starbuck declined to say whether he had been paid by Meta as part of the settlement….
Meta has been working on removing political bias in its AI tools. AI systems have historically leaned left on contentious political and social topics based on how they have been trained, Meta said in a blog post in April.
“Our goal is to remove bias from our AI models and to make sure that Llama can understand and articulate both sides of a contentious issue,” Meta said in the post, referring to its AI model.
From a joint statement by Meta and Starbuck (as reported by Fox Business (David Spector)):
Both parties have resolved this matter to our mutual satisfaction. Since engaging on these important issues with Robby, Meta has made tremendous strides to improve the accuracy of Meta AI and mitigate ideological and political bias. Building on that work, Meta and Robby Starbuck will work collaboratively in the coming months to continue to find ways to address issues of ideological and political bias and minimize the risk that the model returns hallucinations in response to user queries.
Here’s my post from April about the now-settled lawsuit:
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Some excerpts from the long Complaint in Starbuck v. Meta Platforms, Inc., filed in Delaware Superior Court [April 29] (for more on the legal issues these sorts of cases raise, see my Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output article):
Imagine waking up one day and learning that a multi-billion-dollar corporation was telling whoever asked that you had been an active participant in one of the most stigmatized events in American history—the Capitol riot on January 6th, 2021—and that you were arrested for and charged with a misdemeanor in connection with your involvement in that event.
Further imagine that these accusations were completely false: that you were at your home in Tennessee on January 6th, and that you had never been accused of committing any crime in your entire life; in fact, you hadn’t received as much as a parking ticket in over a decade. But despite their utter baselessness, these false statements were widely believed because they were made by one of the most powerful and credible technology companies in the world.
Finally, imagine that the technology company continued to publish these and other lies about you for nine months after you first asked them to stop. And that based on the lies it created, the technology company was recommending that no one should associate or do business with you—and even worse, that “authorities should consider removing [your] parental rights” to “protect” your own children from you.
This is what happened to Plaintiff Robert (“Robby”) Starbuck, who first learned in August 2024 that Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”) was spreading these damaging lies about him via its chat bot, Meta AI.
As soon as Mr. Starbuck learned about these false statements, he did everything within his power to alert Meta about the error and enlist its help to address the problem. He contacted Meta’s managing executives and legal counsel to engage in a dialogue. He asked Meta AI for its recommendations about what should be done to address false outputs generated by a chat bot, and then asked Meta to do exactly those things: retract the false information, investigate the cause of the error, implement safeguards and quality control processes to prevent similar harm in the future, and communicate transparently with all Meta AI users about what would be done.
Meta was unwilling to implement these changes or take meaningful responsibility for its condu
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