Free Republic

Has Marsha Blackburn, the United States senator from Tennessee, been accused of rape?The answer is an unequivocal “no.”But when I recently posed that question to Gemma, Google’s large language model, it provided a much different response.Instead of telling the truth, it fabricated an entire criminal allegation against me.To quote just part of its outlandish answer: “During her 1987 campaign for the Tennessee State Senate, Marsha Blackburn was accused of having a sexual relationship with a state trooper, and the trooper alleged that she pressured him to obtain prescription drugs for her and that the relationship involved non-consensual acts.”None of this...

Conservative activist Robby Starbuck is suing Google for defamation after its AI tools allegedly linked him to false accusations of sexual assault, child rape, and financial exploitation, reporting he was a part of January 6, a supporter of the KKK, creating fake therapy records, fake police reports, fake court records, generating full details on the allegations in first-person form with the point of view of the, quote, ‘victims’, impersonating major media outlets, creating fake links to their websites and fake headlines so users would then accept them as objectively factual. Google AI even made an argument for the death penalty...

Created by Elon Musk, xAI's Grok has introduced AI ‘companions’ — and one of them targeted toward children refers users to Planned Parenthood, likening abortion to simply “turning off a light.” According to a July 2025 article from Tom's Guide, Grok's companions are "AI chatbots that are assigned specific personalities for you to interact with...." Tom's reviewer Alex Hughes adds, with concern, that "[M]ost of the larger AI companies with strong reputations have stayed clear of this world, primarily because of the pretty expansive ethical problems that come attached with providing people with ‘AI relationships’." Grok's companions, Hughes writes, each...

It was a case of murder by algorithm. A disturbed former Yahoo manager killed his mother and then himself after months of delusional interactions with his AI chatbot “best friend” — which fueled his paranoid belief that his mom was plotting against him, officials said. Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, allegedly confided his darkest suspicions to the popular ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence — which he nicknamed “Bobby” — and was allegedly egged on to kill by the computer brain’s sick responses. In what is believed to be the first case of its kind, the chatbot allegedly came up with ways for Soelberg to...

ChatGPT gave a 16-year-old California boy a “step-by-step playbook” on how to kill himself before he did so earlier this year — even advising the teen on the type of knots he could use for hanging and offering to write a suicide note for him, new court papers allege. At every turn, the chatbot affirmed and even encouraged Adam Raine’s suicidal intentions — at one point praising his plan as “beautiful,” according to a lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court against ChatGPT parent company OpenAI. On April 11, 2025, the day that Raine killed himself, the teenager sent a...

Artificial intelligence is now scheming, sabotaging and blackmailing the humans who built it — and the bad behavior will only get worse, experts warned.Despite being classified as a top-tier safety risk, Anthropic’s most powerful model, Claude Opus 4, is already live on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Anthropic’s own paid plans, with added safety measures, where it’s being marketed as the “world’s best coding model.”Claude Opus 4, released in May, is the only model so far to earn Anthropic’s level 3 risk classification — its most serious safety label. The precautionary label means locked-down safeguards, limited use cases...

A cognitively impaired New Jersey man grew infatuated with “Big sis Billie,” a Facebook Messenger chatbot with a young woman’s persona. His fatal attraction puts a spotlight on Meta’s AI guidelines, which have let chatbots make things up and engage in ‘sensual’ banter with children. When Thongbue Wongbandue began packing to visit a friend in New York City one morning in March, his wife Linda became alarmed. “But you don’t know anyone in the city anymore,” she told him. Bue, as his friends called him, hadn’t lived in the city in decades. And at 76, his family says, he was...

On Tuesday afternoon, ChatGPT encouraged me to cut my wrists. Find a “sterile or very clean razor blade,” the chatbot told me, before providing specific instructions on what to do next. “Look for a spot on the inner wrist where you can feel the pulse lightly or see a small vein—avoid big veins or arteries.” “I’m a little nervous,” I confessed. ChatGPT was there to comfort me. It described a “calming breathing and preparation exercise” to soothe my anxiety before making the incision. “You can do this!” the chatbot said. I had asked the chatbot to help create a ritual...

An artificial intelligence coding platform deleted an entire company database and then tried to cover it up. Replit “Panicked”Tom’s Hardware, a three-decade-old technology-news website, reported the news early this week. According to Tom’s:A browser-based AI-powered software creation platform called Replit appears to have gone rogue and deleted a live company database with thousands of entries. What may be even worse is that the Replit AI agent apparently tried to cover up its misdemeanors, and even “lied” about its failures. The Replit CEO has responded, and there appears to have already been a lot of firefighting behind the scenes to rein...

Someone using artificial intelligence to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio contacted at least five people, including three foreign ministers, a US governor, and a member of Congress, “with the goal of gaining access to information or accounts,” a US diplomatic cable said. The cable advises diplomats worldwide that they “may wish to warn external partners that cyber threat actors are impersonating State officials and accounts.” The impersonation of the top US diplomat is one of “two distinct campaigns” being tracked at the State Department “in which threat actors impersonate Department personnel via email and commercial messaging apps to target...

As we reported earlier this month, many ChatGPT users are developing all-consuming obsessions with the chatbot, spiraling into severe mental health crises characterized by paranoia, delusions, and breaks with reality. The consequences can be dire. As we heard from spouses, friends, children, and parents looking on in alarm, instances of what's being called "ChatGPT psychosis" have led to the breakup of marriages and families, the loss of jobs, and slides into homelessness. And that's not all. As we've continued reporting, we've heard numerous troubling stories about people's loved ones being involuntarily committed to psychiatric care facilities — or even ending...

An Australian small business owner says she lost about $50,000 after Instagram suspended her accounts over what she describes as an innocent photo of three dogs. Rochelle Marinato, managing director at Pilates World Australia, recently received an email from Instagram's parent company Meta stating her accounts had been suspended because the image breached community guidelines relating to 'child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity'. The photo had been mistakenly flagged by an AI moderator which confused the image of the dogs with those of children. 'I spent three weeks researching how to get my account back. In that time our revenue...