Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Blames Hallucination For AI Assistant Incorrectly Denying Trump Assassination Attempt — But What About Google?

Meta Platforms Inc. META has been criticized for its AI assistant’s false denial of an attempted assassination on former President Donald Trump. However, now the company has finally addressed the issue.

What Happened: In a blog post on Tuesday, Joel Kaplan, the global head of policy at Meta, addressed the issue labeling the AI’s responses as “unfortunate.” He attributed the error to “hallucinations,” a common problem across all generative AI systems.

“Our systems were working to protect the importance and gravity of this event,” he stated, adding, “Rather than have Meta AI give incorrect information about the attempted assassination, we programmed it to simply not answer questions about it after it happened.” 

See Also: Microsoft’s Windows Reportedly Warns Users To Backup Their Data In The Cloud To Have ‘Peace Of Mind’ — But At What Price?

He also addressed the issue of Trump’s picture after the attempted assassination labeled as a “fact check.” Kaplan said a doctored photograph of the former President with his fist in the air was circulating in which the Secret Service agents were shown as smiling.

“Because the photo was altered, a fact check label was initially and correctly applied,” he stated, adding, that because of the similarities between the doctored and original image, the system mistakenly applied the fact-check label to the real photo too.

After Meta posted this blog post, Trump took to Truth Social and slammed both Meta and Alphabet Inc. GOOG GOOGL, stating, “GO AFTER META AND GOOGLE. LET THEM KNOW WE ARE ALL WISE TO THEM, WILL BE MUCH TOUGHER THIS TIME.”

Subscribe to the Benzinga Tech Trends newsletter to get all the latest tech developments delivered to your inbox.

Why It Matters: Alphabet’s Google has also been facing allegations of censoring search results related to the Trump assassination attempt. The search and advertising tech giant has also addressed this issue on Tuesday via a thread on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter.

Google said that autocomplete was not generating predictions for queries about the assassination attempt due to outdated built-in protections related to political violence. However, this has now been resolved.

“Some people also posted that searches for ‘Donald Trump’ returned news stories related to ‘Kamala Harris.’ These labels are automatically generated based on related news topics, and they change over time,” the tech giant said.

Over the past few days, some people on X have posted claims that Search is "censoring" or "banning" particular terms. That's not happening, and we want to set the record straight.

The posts relate to our Autocomplete feature, which predicts queries to save you time. Autocomplete…

— Google Communications (@Google_Comms) July 30, 2024

Check out more of Benzinga's Consumer Tech coverage by following this link.

Read Next: 

• Mark Zuckerberg Gets Triggered By Closed AI Models At SIGGRAPH 2024, Drops F-Bomb While Talking With Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: ‘There Goes Our Broadcast Opportunity'

Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.