When conservatives lauch libel claims, they're often vague nuisance lawsuits designed to harass, impoverish and censor critics for having perfectly cromulent opinions. And Robby Starbuck's repution as a far-right activist certainly invites opinions. But his lawsuit against Meta is plainly about a fact: Facebook's AI chatbot falsely claims that Starbuck attended the Jan 6 riots on Capitol Hill and was arrested and charged with a crime. Given that owner Mark Zuckerberg recently made a show of saying Facebook would no longer police misinformation, we have two ingredients of a successful celebrity libel suit: a false statement of fact and a malicious indifference to the truth.
"The case is WILD and has implications for ALL OF US," Starbuck wrote. "On top of falsely calling me a criminal, Meta suggested my kids be taken from me."
Starbuck's lawsuit joins the ranks of similar cases in which people have sued AI platforms over information provided by chatbots. In 2023, a conservative radio host in Georgia filed a defamation suit against OpenAI alleging ChatGPT provided false information by saying he defrauded and embezzled funds from the Second Amendment Foundation, a gun-rights group.
James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School, said there is "no fundamental reason why" AI companies couldn't be held liable in such cases. Tech companies, he said, can't get around defamation "just by slapping a disclaimer on."
"You can't say, 'Everything I say might be unreliable, so you shouldn't believe it. And by the way, this guy's a murderer.' It can help reduce the degree to which you're perceived as making an assertion, but a blanket disclaimer doesn't fix everything," he said. "There's nothing that would hold the outputs of an AI system like this categorically off limits."
Meta failed to fix the problem after Starbuck complained, but now that he's filed a lawsuit a top executive there issued a public apology. Public apologies are often a prelude to a settlement—lawyers hate apologies and generally won't let you do one until the ink is dry. That said, every week brings more evidence that Meta executives don't take good advice when it comes to communications.
Previously:
• Sarah Palin loses her libel lawsuit against the New York Times
• Trump crony Devin Nunes loses appeal in libel lawsuit
• Bagless billionaire Dyson loses libel lawsuit
