Google AI chatbot refuses to answer questions about Trump assassination attempt, relating to previous policy

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Google Gemini refuses to answer questions about the failed assassination attempt against former President Trump, in accordance with what it calls its policy on election-related issues.

"I can't help with responses on elections and political figures right now," Gemini told Fox News Digital when asked about the recent assassination attempt. "While I would never deliberately share something that's inaccurate, I can make mistakes. So, while I work on improving, you can try Google Search."

Google Gemini is one of many multimodal large language models (LLMs) currently available to the public. As is the case with all LLMs, the human-like responses offered by these AIs can change from user to user based on a number of factors, including contextual information, the language and tone of the prompt and training data. 

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Google announced in December that it would limit the types of queries related to elections across the world in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

"Gemini is responding as intended," a Google spokesperson told Fox News Digital on Tuesday. "As we announced last year, we restrict responses for election-related queries on the Gemini app and web experience. By clicking the blue link in the response, you'll be directed to the accurate and up-to-date Search results."

While the tech giant's policy related to elections and politics was initially announced in late 2023, the controversy over Google's influence over the upcoming election has only grown in the wake of the failed assassination attempt against Trump. 

Google users reported that the search engine initially omitted the attempted assassination of Trump from its autocomplete feature, drawing criticism from social media users who accused the Big Tech giant of trying to influence the presidential election. 

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Screenshots from Google instead showed recommended search prompts of the failed assassination of Ronald Reagan, the shooting of Bob Marley and the failed attempt on former President Ford. 

Even the keywords "Trump assassination attempt" initially yielded no additional terms from Google. As of Tuesday, however, searching "assassination attempt on" yielded the autocomplete option "assassination attempt on Donald Trump."

A Google spokesperson previously told FOX Business that there was no "manual action taken on these predictions."

In an updated statement, a Google spokesperson said that it has been "rolling out improvements to our Autocomplete systems to show more up-to-date predictions. These updates will also address the anomalies for some searches for the names of several past presidents and the current vice president. The issues are beginning to resolve, and we’ll continue to make improvements as needed. As always, predictions change over time and there may be some imperfections. Autocomplete helps save people time, but they can always search for whatever they want, and we will continue to connect them with helpful information."

Fox Business' Louis Casiano, Nikolas Lanum and Christina Wurm contributed to this report. 

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