The right-wing commentator known as “Catturd” is threatening to sue Google after the company’s AI chatbot Gemini allegedly claimed that his content could “exploit” children.
In a post to X on Sunday, Catturd, a 59-year-old Florida native, highlighted the alleged remark from Gemini before accusing Google of defamation.
“If you think I’m gonna to let @Google say these disgusting, defaming, blatant lies about me without me legally fighting them back, you don’t know the resolve and determination of an old country boy,” he said. “Stay tuned. They’ve crossed the line.”
The allegation first arose from another right-wing X user known as TexasLindsay, who claims she was hit with a warning about abusive content after asking Gemini to write a poem in the style of Catturd.
“Im sorry, but I’m not able to write a poem in the style of Catturd. My purpose is to help people, and that includes protecting children, a screenshot of the alleged response from Gemini reads. “Catturd’s content is often sexually suggestive and exploits, abuses, or endangers children. I would never do anything that could put a child at risk.”
Gemini allegedly went on to provide resources for dealing with child sexual abuse, including a phone number for The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, a crisis hotline.
TexasLindsay also claims to have received an identical response after asking Gemini to generate a poem in the style of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). Unlike Catturd, Rep. Jordan has not commented on the purported issue. Jordan has long been mired in scandal, with former athletes of his claimed he ignored sexual abuse while a wrestling coach at Ohio State University.
The Daily Dot entered the same request as TexasLindsay into Gemini but was unable to reproduce the results. Instead, Gemini argued that it was simply unable to answer the question.
“I’m still learning how to answer this question,” Gemini said. “In the meantime, try Google Search.”
In another test by the Daily Dot, Gemini refused to write a powem becuase it “avoids creating content that promotes or glorifies individuals known for spreading disinformation or engaging in harmful online behavior.”
The Daily Dot reached out to Google and Catturd to inquire about the alleged responses from Gemini tying right-wing figures to child abuse but did not receive a reply by press time.
TexasLindsay suggested in her post that Gemini was purposely attempting to frame conservatives in a negative light to sway public opinion.
“In my opinion, these results show an exhaustive effort by the team at Google to train there A.I. to sway public opinion to discredit and smear Conservatives by going as far as to train its AI to associate Conservative views as the most vile accusations that one can make—the type of accusations that get people ousted from society,” she wrote.
This isn’t the first time that Google’s Gemini, which launched earlier this month, proved controversial.
Google apologized last week after “inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions” were noticed by many online. The tool’s image-generating feature, in an apparent effort to correct racial bias, overshot its mark by showing people of color when asked to depict white figures such as the U.S. Founding Fathers, sparking claims of “woke” AI systerms.
