Meta AI chatbot makes up lies about conservative activist, urges law enforcement to take his children away

Filmmaker and conservative political activist Robby Starbuck is suing Meta for defamation after the platform’s AI chatbot made false accusations about him.

In April 2024, Starbuck discovered via a screenshot from a Harley-Davidson dealer aiming to undermine his anti-DEI campaign that Meta AI was accusing him of being involved in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, declaring that he was arrested, charged, and pled guilty to disorderly conduct. It also claimed that he promoted Holocaust denialism and posed a threat to his children’s well-being, encouraging advertisers to not work with him and law enforcement to consider taking custody of his children.

Starbuck’s legal team contacted Meta about the AI chatbot’s false statements, but Meta’s inadequate response allowed the defamatory claims to persist until April 2025, prompting his defamation lawsuit.

“What Meta has done to Robby needs to be corrected, or they will do it to everyone,” warns Glenn Beck.

On a recent episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” he invited Robby to share what Glenn believes is the most dangerous AI story he’s ever heard.

“I wasn’t even in D.C. [on January 6, 2021], so this was totally wholesale invented out of nowhere,” says Robby.

At first, he pondered the possibility of an AI “hallucination” — a common issue with AI models where they generate incorrect or fabricated information.

However, when the bot suggested that his kids would “be better off in the care of somebody who was more accepting of transgenderism and DEI,” he knew that this attack on him was almost certainly intentional.

“There’s no way this is a hallucination,” says Glenn.

The question we need to be asking, Robby says, is “how did it get trained to believe this?”

It’s a question that impacts us all.

“We are very close to a future where people are going to have robotics in their homes that are trained on AI. Thousands and thousands of apps have already been trained on Meta’s AI, and so that’s going to last a very long time,” he says.

Even if someone wins a defamation lawsuit against an AI company, there will still be “all these unplugged models out in the wild that have been downloaded by millions of people,” meaning the lies that fueled the lawsuit won’t just disappear.

“You will never put the genie back in that bottle because they can’t update the versions that are disconnected from the internet,” warns Robby. “When you think about the future, you could have robots that are walking around in law enforcement thinking that I am a criminal.”

“This is terrifying, Robby,” says Glenn. “I hope justice actually works for you and the system works for you because if not, this is the beginning of AI tyranny.”

To hear more details about Robby’s defamation lawsuit, watch the clip above.

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