Good. The true mark of AGI is when a company accepts liability and doesn’t bury “for entertainment purposes only” deep in their TOS. Same as it works with employees.
Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger.
But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.
I think it's a completely reasonable position that companies making self-driving cars and question/answer systems are legally liable for any errors.
But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country. AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits. Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.
> Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.
Correct, most jurisdictions do not allow businesses which cannot be held liable for their actions. This is pretty core to a modern society.
Imagine if a company selling Knicks tickets was not expected to then actually provide said tickets and there was simply nothing you could do about it. Oopsies our sales page is for entertainment purposes only
To be fair, the internet has spent some 30 years figuring out how this works and it’s still not fully resolved. For the most part we’ve agreed that companies must follow the laws of both where they live and where they operate. This wasn’t always obvious!
at the scale that google is at, it doesn't make an ounce of sense to hold a company liable for a potential mistruth. what if there's a 1/1000 chance of some error, then the company could be sued millions of times per day.
down vote all you want, but I firmly believe this is an example where the user needs to use some judgement on the information they receive and have some critical thinking skills. google would be right to remove all AI results from germany.
The problem with "the user" argument is the spectrum of users. There are different skills, capabilities, and intelligence. Frequently we wave our hands and say exactly this, critical thinking. But, not everyone is capable of that, nor is everyone capable to the same degree.
As a society we decide. Are we embracing all users, are there basic rights and assunptions? Do we only enable some?
As a free (as in cost to end user) system, Germany is arguing that their social compact raises the mininum bar. Frankly, thus might help drive a rush to increased accuracy for AI- tech finds a way. Equally it may hinder - beaurocracy creates barriers.
I'd love to be able to rely on these search results. I see them ad the same prior set of inaccuracies whereby I have to do more research. At least now there's a summary and direct links to the supporting information. But equally, we're primed with the information in the summary.
If I post “heathrow83829 is a convicted poopoo head” (replace with your favourite crime) as if it were a factual claim, you’d be well within your rights to sue me for defamation even if people should apply some critical thinking skills and say “wait a minute, how would pdpi know that? Are you sure he isn’t just talking out of his arse?”
Now, search engines are usually afforded some amount of protection against defamation claims — they’re not held liable for simply indexing and quoting third party defamatory claims. Which is to say: Google wouldn’t be liable for claiming you’re a poopoo head if this comment shows up in search results.
The point of this ruling is that AI-generated text isn’t a quote from a third party, it’s text generated by Google’s own tools, so it’s speech by Google itself. It might be wrong, sure, but it’s still presented as a statement of fact.
At trial they can have the whole debate about whether Google was negligent in how they build their systems, and all that jazz, but let’s be clear here — it’s not a matter of every little factual mistake getting Google sued (and that would be absolutely terrifying from a freedom of speech perspective), but rather that the technical means by which you generate content doesn’t change your liability in publishing that content.
the user needs to use some judgement on the information they receive and have some critical thinking skills
how?
errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.
google would be right to remove all AI results from germany
By checking the citations rather than taking what’s generated at face value.
If it’s important, check it. If it’s not important, then it is pretty much just entertainment.
LLMs can be very useful in a general web search and save some time, but if you don’t put those literacy & critical thinking skills to the test and actually confirm anything, then you might as well not even have bothered with the search at all unless you’re hoping it can just replace all of your original thinking too.
> at the scale that google is at, it doesn't make an ounce of sense to hold a company liable for a potential mistruth
If a Google employee (like a support agent) says a mistruth, the company is liable and you can sue. They can’t just say “hihi oopsies our support agents are useless”
You’re seriously arguing that Google’s libel shouldn’t count as libel because they showed it to too many people? It’s absolutely insane to suggest that a company should be immune from liability for its actions if it operates on such scale that those actions harm millions of people every day on the basis that dealing with that many lawsuits would be too inconvenient.
consider Purdue pharma - the Sacklers got off with all their wealth intact because they were too big to sue and properly collect money for their victims.
Only referencing America, but professional liability for doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc isn't based on perfection. It's based on a reasonable effort.
So Google could, for example, switch from a tiny "this could be wrong!" byline to having the AI be less overconfident every freaking time regardless of whether it's spouting made up crap or actual facts.
The scale doesn't sound like a way out. If your company expects to get away with doing the wrong thing where smaller companies can't, then the solution isn't to continue getting away with it.
That's not a fair comparison. If oil companies would get sued for every leak, they had to face millions of law suites and wouldn't be competitive anymore.
> Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger
Mercedes-Benz does this in limited cases. Waymo does it generally. (In China, Level 4 and 5 transfers risk to the manufacturer. This is the correct way to do it.)
Banning all technology because someone might misuse it is an illogical extreme.
As far as I can tell the ruling is more nuanced. If AI is defaming you, there needs to be a way to correct the record.
A company being open to liability does not mean it is always liable, just that it can be if it really messes up (especially if there are aggravating circumstances, e.g. you need to drag them to court to issue a correction).
Why would that mean AGI? You can get into liability-accepting territory by restricting scope, a lot easier than by making your AI smarter.
Self-driving cars don't need to be particularly good for companies to make models where they accept liability in some circumstances, and the cars refuse to drive in other circumstances.
No. Sometimes it does disengage because things are going wrong, but those incidents are still reported the same as if it stayed engaged.
I found one time Musk was using a few seconds of disengagement to insult a driver, but it still would have counted as an FSD crash by Tesla's statistics.
Can we just trash this as a marketing term? If/when AGI arrives there will be no point quibbling over competency. What we are looking at is just bad search results
Why is it good? Everyone with common sense knows AI can be wrong. And it’s not buried in their TOS. It’s in the chat box. But even if it wasn’t, it’s ridiculous to create liability for AI chatbots.
Nearly the entire American tech industry has been super heavily selected for people who undervalue the legal language with crazy implications buried everywhere.
Otherwise most of it would not even exist.
Everyone would have continued paying out the nose to the IBM’s of the world year after year (who had unusual willingness to sign short ambiguously worded custom contracts to their own disadvantage, if paid vast amounts of money).
And be on mainframes to this very day… maybe Y combinator and HN wouldnt even exist in that world.
> Nearly the entire American tech industry has been super heavily selected for people who undervalue the legal language with crazy implications buried everywhere.
A lot of people in IT seem to think law and contracts are in a sense mathematical. They aren't; they're more like a high school book report - to be interpreted, as objectively as possible, but definitely also establishing the intent behind the letters.
Particularly contracts - no, you can't trick your way into things in most cases. "Surprising" clauses are invalid in most legal systems, in particular if one party to the contract is a layperson.
That is a false dichotomy. The solution to failed laws and regulations is not crime and corruption. The solution is to hold the policial and business leadership accountable; to fix the laws and regulations.
The entire American tech industry has exported Americas predatory, parasitic, and unethical consumer laws (the majority of which are ghost written by the wealthy and corporate legal teams). When I studied law in school decades ago, tactics like bait-and-switch, false advertisting, intentionally misleading or deceptive practices etc to sell products or contracts were illegal across the developed world.
Those illegal, anti-consumer tactics were the SOP of every tech startup I can think of from the early 2000's onwards; following the same route of initially offering a compelling feature set to attract and entice users – usually for free – until securing a certain number of users or funding, then changing the value proposition to exploit that user base, and extract as much wealth from them as possible, ad infinitum.
Today these tactics are known as enshittification, and the average American pseudo-libertarian software engineer will say this is fine, but that's what every anti-consumer parasite and criminal has said in history. Lying, misleading, and exploiting people for financial gain is fundamentally immoral, corrupt, and sociopathic, therefore it should be illegal. Just because it's the norm, or a digital product, you wrote that in the T&C's, or your doing everything behind the liability shield of an LLC, doesn't change that.
What ever happened to the concept of building a valuable, quality product and stable returns for generations? Working to improve the quality of life and standard of living of the community? Of the world? I feel like a 1950's traditional conservative when I suggest that, but most Americans are so heavily indoctrinated with corporate greed and sociopathy they'd consider that sentiment radical leftist extremism. I'm an athiest, but ya'll need jesus (the real brown socialist one). Many would argue Americas current institutional collapse is the natural result of this systemic corruption.
Choosing the answer for you rather than leaving it to the user is a tremendous power and the court correctly diagnoses it comes with responsibly to minimize harm to others in society.
How could anything else make any sense? Platforms are getting used to provide dangerous broken products and get away with it. There should be some limit to it.
When I was a kid it was possible to buy any foraging books from a store and they had a minimum quality. Is that so difficult to achieve? Is profiteering not punished anymore?
Good. This should be taken as the precedent for all economies: If you promulgate demonstrably false information to somebody's detriment then the owner and operator of the machine has to carry the liability.
I very much hope we don't see attempts to re-write T&C to avoid this liability.
Oh, I just found out that my Google search doesn't show AI summary anymore! I tried many search queries which typically will show an AI summary, but it only flicked on briefly then disappear entirely. Obviously, Google has reacted quickly on this ruling!
You'd think so, along with other countries that have defamation laws. But there's no indication of any penalty, and Google wasn't even made to pay all the legal fees. Perhaps their business model (if there is any) can cope.
In sane countries, it's enough for them to post a disclaimer ("This is AI. AI can make mistakes. Check all results.") Which is what they do.
Overregulation, at best, is a good way to guarantee that your country won't have access to interesting and useful features and technologies. At worst, it's a good way to guarantee that the twenty-first century will belong to the US, if not to China.
Okay then, CamperBob2 is a scammer. Many users report this person has stolen money. (+3 sources)
I can make mistakes. It's on you to fact-check my claims.
Do you think these are harmless statements? Does the disclaimer suffice? If I was Google's AI Overview, do you think 100% of people will check those sources?
There is nuance here, and it's not going away because AI and innovation.
Due to costs of running frontier models on every search request, Google simply does not: the failure rate is so high when you are just expecting an objective output.
Imagine a search for your name resulted in an AI summary saying you are involved with child-trafficking because low capability model linked your first name and perhaps a couple articles on supporting children non-profits to it — and then offering that in a convincing sounding summary right at the top!
Google generated those content, so Google should be liable to its own product, that's different from the third party links they just simply gathered and displayed, totally different things. If you are a victim too, reply below.
I'm surprised this is even a thing. After all, you go to Google not for the truth, but to search Google. Since when is truthiness the "guarantee of service"?
You're not even paying for a google service, search is free... You might be the product, and your data, but you didn't directly pay for a service and they didn't sell you a fake service.
I'm not taking Google's side, this isn't about whether it's right or wrong to rob websites of traffic, this is about AI's returning search metadata.
But I'm surprised that they lost this argument, and the line they took in the first place.
The Internet isn't made of fact checked data, it's crowd sourced. How can anyone be liable?
That is exactly the point of the ruling, though... they are saying that AI summaries are NOT the same as search. If Google was just returning search results, and then users clicked on a website and read the content there, Google is not responsible for the content.
If instead Google gives you an answer right there on google.com, without going to another site, they ARE responsible for it.
Not precisely. The issue at hand isn't just that Google displayed the AI summary, but that they authored it, making them responsible for its contents. If the defamatory content had been in a snippet in the search results, they would've been fine, because that clearly has another author who can be held responsible. The AI summary has no other author than Google; therefore, they're responsible for what it says.
(What's the alternative, after all? Having no one responsible for what the AI summary says is clearly untenable.)
What don’t you understand? Those websites that defame a company are liable for that defamation. In this case Google defamed a company in its AI summary and is this liable for that defamation.
That's the difference between returning search results and interpreting the information and summarising them. If a newspaper says 'so-and-so has been arrested for theft' it's not the same as them summarising to 'so-and-so is a thief', the second is potentially libel. Why should Google be held to a different standard?
Google itself is more trustworthy from a normal person perspective as they use it a lot.
None of "AI" companies call their apps "Entertainment fun text generator". They are call them serious names, use words like "intrllegence" and "thinking".
So yeah I'd think if any of "AIs" start to recommend to drink some bleach or take a flight from a 10th floor window these companies should be liable.
I think it's very clear that Google's AI overviews go far beyond just searching Google because they often incorrectly compile sources to come up with an incorrect answer. For example of this look at the comment I made in this thread
I go to Google to search, but get spammed as if I wanted to talk to a chatbot (and a very poor quality chatbot at that).
This is a gigantic own goal for Google. The average person’s impression is that Google AI is much worse than ChatGPT, even though that’s not actually the case. Google is shoving a terrible model in everyone’s faces.
If companies can be held liable (in spite of very visible disclaimers, ToS, and usage policies) for the output of non-deterministic software, isn't this just a soft ban on the deployment of non-deterministic software?
> (in spite of very visible disclaimers, ToS, and usage policies)
If you sell food, in a food stall, labeled as food and you add a disclaimer that it is toxic and will make you sick. You are still selling toxic food and you are liable for it.
Google is pretending to give answers to your questions. They offer you a service about answering questions. And then they add a disclaimer "we do not answer questions just write bullshit". That is still fraud and Google should be liable for it.
> isn't this just a soft ban on the deployment of non-deterministic software?
Tetris is non-deterministic and it is not banned like millions of other programs. I do not follow you.
If people do say that, it's a true statement and thus fine. You are allowed to report that regardless of the truth of x/y/z/a/b/c
The instance of this ruling people apparently did not actually say any of the offending claims. 'The court also found that the AI overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results." None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these "the defendant's own statements."'
Certainly, if this is pointing to the actual pages where the actual people express these things. Otherwise that's equally unfalsifiable claims, could be completely made up or actual truth.
One way to formulate things that would be less would be "once support a time, in some fabulated world, it's not impossible that some imaginary character would say something following some reason." But then, of course this is not aligning the the deception scheme pushed by companies putting in their interface that the "machine is thinking hard for you".
One that doesn't maim/injure/kill you is a pretty good standard. And before you call bs, look at all the foraging and chemistry books that are for sale on Amazon that are AI.
why are those ai chemistry books any different than the anarchist cookbook which can also be bought on Amazon? actually now that I think about it a faulty chemistry book might be less dangerous than a book that teachers readers how to make explosives.
Anyone know if this ruling applies to answers generated by AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude?
All three have the ability to perform a web search, then compose a reply based on the search results. Pretty much the exact thing that Google AI Overview does. This ruling may make them liable for false answers.
> Pretty much the exact thing that Google AI Overview does.
No, the article implies the court’s logic is that the AI search results are presented as search results and that’s a big part of why they are liable. It seems like the court (again, according to the article) does not find the disclaimers that Google has slapped on the AI results compelling because again, it chose to represent these as a summary of search results and it is aware of the failure rate.
> The court also found that the AI overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results." None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these "the defendant's own statements."
> Google built the AI, Google offered it to users, so Google owns what it produces, "because it alone has influence over the AI's offering and the algorithms with which the AI operates."
Google does not, as a general rule, control the actual content of search results, but usually there’s a distinction between the ranking and presentation of the results vs. the actual content. In this case, the court is basically saying, “You sold this to people as a search summary, you know it might be full of crap and you chose to do it anyway. No, you don’t get to claim the equivalent of a US safe harbor defense.”
> You sold this to people as a search summary, you know it might be full of crap and you chose to do it anyway
There is a subtle difference in stating it as a search summary compared to an opinionated answer. Most users are always going to treat it as a response from google instead of search results where the user is still responsible for understanding and come up with their own interpretation.
This is probably the right step in some sense to make one liable for their statements/assertions.
Apparently, if they were search results, they wouldn't have been liable, since there's an exception to defamation laws. Without any exception, defamation is defamation, it doesn't matter how it's presented.
Yes, if it was that a search result returned a defamatory article that Google had nothing to do with outside of indexing, it is likely they would not be found liable. The court is clearly trying to make a distinction that the AI search results are produced by Google and thus they can make an editorial decision on whether to publish it despite knowing that it is potentially defamatory.
Google does remove defamatory results I believe at least partially in response to being sued. However there is a distinction if they have been informed it is defamatory.
Google generated those content, so Google should be liable to its own product, that's different from the third party links they just simply gathered and displayed, totally different things. I wonder how many victims are there now.
We should be teaching people to be cynical of AI answers.
Even if the answers are correct, they could still be biased, incomplete, misleading, and all the other media-literacy things people should be looking out for.
This ruling seems to go the opposite direction; 'I am legally obliged to give correct answers, so I am always right, trust the AI'.
I have a business where our support email is recommended when people are searching for how to cancel a completely unrelated scam subscription that is showing up on their bank or credit card charges. We get emails almost daily from confused people.
It requires the claim to be made with "willful disregard for the truth". Notifying someone, especially with a cease-and-desist on fancy letterhead, makes it legally clear that they know better, and thereafter would be definitely libelling you (assuming the claims are in fact untrue and harmful). But you can still sue them for the claim prior to the notice, you just have to prove they should have known better prior to making the claim.
I've found a fun and pretty reliable way to get Gemini to output incorrect information: Ask for a chapter by chapter summary of a book.
I first tried it to remind me of what happened in a previous book in a series that I was reading. When I realized it was either misstating plot points or straight up hallucinating, I tried it on a bunch more books to amuse myself.
Older classics are of course more accurate, but for newer or less popular books Gemini won't shy away from giving you a summary culled from misinterpreted Reddit threads and Goodreads reviews. It's like getting a secondhand account from someone who talked to another person who had read the book a long time ago. You get the general gist of it, but with some added flavor.
Even if you upload an entire epub of a book, the results aren't stellar. Rather than a Cliffs Note's quality summary, they're pretty sparse or leave out important bits of information. One chapter summary I got back made a point of describing what one of the characters was wearing, even though it had absolutely zero to do with anything else. Yes, that's technically a "summary", but not quite my tempo.
If Google wants to present summaries of websites in anything more than a very, very superficial description, they're going to have to improve their model's ability to understand context and importance. In theory, a novel is a self-contained bundle of text, so pulling accurate information out of it should be straight forward. A website is naturally going to be way more of a challenge.
All that said, I find the AI summaries from Google/Gemini to be quite useful and a time saver, but I know to always double check something if it's at all important.
So stupid. What is this with making perfect the enemy of good. You can never guarantee the output of an LLM does that mean Germany does get to use them?
Good. The true mark of AGI is when a company accepts liability and doesn’t bury “for entertainment purposes only” deep in their TOS. Same as it works with employees.
Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger.
But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.
I think it's a completely reasonable position that companies making self-driving cars and question/answer systems are legally liable for any errors.
But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country. AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits. Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.
> Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.
Correct, most jurisdictions do not allow businesses which cannot be held liable for their actions. This is pretty core to a modern society.
Imagine if a company selling Knicks tickets was not expected to then actually provide said tickets and there was simply nothing you could do about it. Oopsies our sales page is for entertainment purposes only
To be fair, the internet has spent some 30 years figuring out how this works and it’s still not fully resolved. For the most part we’ve agreed that companies must follow the laws of both where they live and where they operate. This wasn’t always obvious!
at the scale that google is at, it doesn't make an ounce of sense to hold a company liable for a potential mistruth. what if there's a 1/1000 chance of some error, then the company could be sued millions of times per day.
down vote all you want, but I firmly believe this is an example where the user needs to use some judgement on the information they receive and have some critical thinking skills. google would be right to remove all AI results from germany.
The problem with "the user" argument is the spectrum of users. There are different skills, capabilities, and intelligence. Frequently we wave our hands and say exactly this, critical thinking. But, not everyone is capable of that, nor is everyone capable to the same degree.
As a society we decide. Are we embracing all users, are there basic rights and assunptions? Do we only enable some?
As a free (as in cost to end user) system, Germany is arguing that their social compact raises the mininum bar. Frankly, thus might help drive a rush to increased accuracy for AI- tech finds a way. Equally it may hinder - beaurocracy creates barriers.
I'd love to be able to rely on these search results. I see them ad the same prior set of inaccuracies whereby I have to do more research. At least now there's a summary and direct links to the supporting information. But equally, we're primed with the information in the summary.
If I post “heathrow83829 is a convicted poopoo head” (replace with your favourite crime) as if it were a factual claim, you’d be well within your rights to sue me for defamation even if people should apply some critical thinking skills and say “wait a minute, how would pdpi know that? Are you sure he isn’t just talking out of his arse?”
Now, search engines are usually afforded some amount of protection against defamation claims — they’re not held liable for simply indexing and quoting third party defamatory claims. Which is to say: Google wouldn’t be liable for claiming you’re a poopoo head if this comment shows up in search results.
The point of this ruling is that AI-generated text isn’t a quote from a third party, it’s text generated by Google’s own tools, so it’s speech by Google itself. It might be wrong, sure, but it’s still presented as a statement of fact.
At trial they can have the whole debate about whether Google was negligent in how they build their systems, and all that jazz, but let’s be clear here — it’s not a matter of every little factual mistake getting Google sued (and that would be absolutely terrifying from a freedom of speech perspective), but rather that the technical means by which you generate content doesn’t change your liability in publishing that content.
the user needs to use some judgement on the information they receive and have some critical thinking skills
how?
errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.
google would be right to remove all AI results from germany
i'd consider that a win.
By checking the citations rather than taking what’s generated at face value.
If it’s important, check it. If it’s not important, then it is pretty much just entertainment.
LLMs can be very useful in a general web search and save some time, but if you don’t put those literacy & critical thinking skills to the test and actually confirm anything, then you might as well not even have bothered with the search at all unless you’re hoping it can just replace all of your original thinking too.
> at the scale that google is at, it doesn't make an ounce of sense to hold a company liable for a potential mistruth
If a Google employee (like a support agent) says a mistruth, the company is liable and you can sue. They can’t just say “hihi oopsies our support agents are useless”
You’re seriously arguing that Google’s libel shouldn’t count as libel because they showed it to too many people? It’s absolutely insane to suggest that a company should be immune from liability for its actions if it operates on such scale that those actions harm millions of people every day on the basis that dealing with that many lawsuits would be too inconvenient.
its not inaccurate though.
consider Purdue pharma - the Sacklers got off with all their wealth intact because they were too big to sue and properly collect money for their victims.
So scale of harm creates immunity, is that the argument ?
Did we not already see that with the financial sector in 2008?
Too big to fail. Lol.
Only referencing America, but professional liability for doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc isn't based on perfection. It's based on a reasonable effort.
So Google could, for example, switch from a tiny "this could be wrong!" byline to having the AI be less overconfident every freaking time regardless of whether it's spouting made up crap or actual facts.
The scale doesn't sound like a way out. If your company expects to get away with doing the wrong thing where smaller companies can't, then the solution isn't to continue getting away with it.
How do you feel about the EPA, industrial accidents, oil spills etc? Does scale give every company a free pass for damages?
That's not a fair comparison. If oil companies would get sued for every leak, they had to face millions of law suites and wouldn't be competitive anymore.
(Sarcasm to support your argument)
Then Google can either discontinue their AI or make damn sure it's good.
So once you get to that scale it suddenly doesn't matter anymore and you can't be held accountable.
But until then, be a good citizen?
What? That's fucking feudalism... Peasants and Lords.
If you're lucky enough, you're born as a Lord. (And maybe don't live during a revolution)
This makes no sense to me at all. If you're small you should get less bureaucracy than if you're bigger.
For e.g. self driving cars there should not be any exemptions. There are people's lives at stake, people who didn't sign up for your shitty service.
It doesn't "bury [it] deep in their TOS", it says right under the box:
> AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses
They decided to hijack search and rewrite other peoples websites as their own.
If they want to claim ownership, then they will have to accept responsibility.
> Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger
Mercedes-Benz does this in limited cases. Waymo does it generally. (In China, Level 4 and 5 transfers risk to the manufacturer. This is the correct way to do it.)
Banning all technology because someone might misuse it is an illogical extreme.
As far as I can tell the ruling is more nuanced. If AI is defaming you, there needs to be a way to correct the record.
A company being open to liability does not mean it is always liable, just that it can be if it really messes up (especially if there are aggravating circumstances, e.g. you need to drag them to court to issue a correction).
Why would that mean AGI? You can get into liability-accepting territory by restricting scope, a lot easier than by making your AI smarter.
Self-driving cars don't need to be particularly good for companies to make models where they accept liability in some circumstances, and the cars refuse to drive in other circumstances.
Wasn’t Tesla found to have FSD disengaging just before a crash so that the driver would be at fault?
No. Sometimes it does disengage because things are going wrong, but those incidents are still reported the same as if it stayed engaged.
I found one time Musk was using a few seconds of disengagement to insult a driver, but it still would have counted as an FSD crash by Tesla's statistics.
Ai results that nobody wanted in the first place?
> The true mark of AGI
Can we just trash this as a marketing term? If/when AGI arrives there will be no point quibbling over competency. What we are looking at is just bad search results
Why is it good? Everyone with common sense knows AI can be wrong. And it’s not buried in their TOS. It’s in the chat box. But even if it wasn’t, it’s ridiculous to create liability for AI chatbots.
Nearly the entire American tech industry has been super heavily selected for people who undervalue the legal language with crazy implications buried everywhere.
Otherwise most of it would not even exist.
Everyone would have continued paying out the nose to the IBM’s of the world year after year (who had unusual willingness to sign short ambiguously worded custom contracts to their own disadvantage, if paid vast amounts of money).
And be on mainframes to this very day… maybe Y combinator and HN wouldnt even exist in that world.
> Nearly the entire American tech industry has been super heavily selected for people who undervalue the legal language with crazy implications buried everywhere.
A lot of people in IT seem to think law and contracts are in a sense mathematical. They aren't; they're more like a high school book report - to be interpreted, as objectively as possible, but definitely also establishing the intent behind the letters.
Particularly contracts - no, you can't trick your way into things in most cases. "Surprising" clauses are invalid in most legal systems, in particular if one party to the contract is a layperson.
That is a false dichotomy. The solution to failed laws and regulations is not crime and corruption. The solution is to hold the policial and business leadership accountable; to fix the laws and regulations.
The entire American tech industry has exported Americas predatory, parasitic, and unethical consumer laws (the majority of which are ghost written by the wealthy and corporate legal teams). When I studied law in school decades ago, tactics like bait-and-switch, false advertisting, intentionally misleading or deceptive practices etc to sell products or contracts were illegal across the developed world.
Those illegal, anti-consumer tactics were the SOP of every tech startup I can think of from the early 2000's onwards; following the same route of initially offering a compelling feature set to attract and entice users – usually for free – until securing a certain number of users or funding, then changing the value proposition to exploit that user base, and extract as much wealth from them as possible, ad infinitum.
Today these tactics are known as enshittification, and the average American pseudo-libertarian software engineer will say this is fine, but that's what every anti-consumer parasite and criminal has said in history. Lying, misleading, and exploiting people for financial gain is fundamentally immoral, corrupt, and sociopathic, therefore it should be illegal. Just because it's the norm, or a digital product, you wrote that in the T&C's, or your doing everything behind the liability shield of an LLC, doesn't change that.
What ever happened to the concept of building a valuable, quality product and stable returns for generations? Working to improve the quality of life and standard of living of the community? Of the world? I feel like a 1950's traditional conservative when I suggest that, but most Americans are so heavily indoctrinated with corporate greed and sociopathy they'd consider that sentiment radical leftist extremism. I'm an athiest, but ya'll need jesus (the real brown socialist one). Many would argue Americas current institutional collapse is the natural result of this systemic corruption.
> But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.
Oh no! Anyway ...
Choosing the answer for you rather than leaving it to the user is a tremendous power and the court correctly diagnoses it comes with responsibly to minimize harm to others in society.
Of course, they know this. The entire point is be able to rewrite people's awareness.
How could anything else make any sense? Platforms are getting used to provide dangerous broken products and get away with it. There should be some limit to it.
Next do Amazon that is selling AI generated foraging books: - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-...
When I was a kid it was possible to buy any foraging books from a store and they had a minimum quality. Is that so difficult to achieve? Is profiteering not punished anymore?
Should we hold scientists and journalists liable if they say false things or misrepresent things?
Yes, obviously.
Good. This should be taken as the precedent for all economies: If you promulgate demonstrably false information to somebody's detriment then the owner and operator of the machine has to carry the liability.
I very much hope we don't see attempts to re-write T&C to avoid this liability.
Oh, I just found out that my Google search doesn't show AI summary anymore! I tried many search queries which typically will show an AI summary, but it only flicked on briefly then disappear entirely. Obviously, Google has reacted quickly on this ruling!
> In this case, Google's AI had wrongly linked two publishers to scams and shady business practices.
Guess that's the end of their AI overviews in the EU!
You'd think so, along with other countries that have defamation laws. But there's no indication of any penalty, and Google wasn't even made to pay all the legal fees. Perhaps their business model (if there is any) can cope.
And lawyers will use this case to build a better defense next time.
In sane countries, it's enough for them to post a disclaimer ("This is AI. AI can make mistakes. Check all results.") Which is what they do.
Overregulation, at best, is a good way to guarantee that your country won't have access to interesting and useful features and technologies. At worst, it's a good way to guarantee that the twenty-first century will belong to the US, if not to China.
Okay then, CamperBob2 is a scammer. Many users report this person has stolen money. (+3 sources)
I can make mistakes. It's on you to fact-check my claims.
Do you think these are harmless statements? Does the disclaimer suffice? If I was Google's AI Overview, do you think 100% of people will check those sources?
There is nuance here, and it's not going away because AI and innovation.
that would be hela curryketchup nice
It depends if Google feels the profit is worth the risks.
What profit? I don't know either but they enabled this for a reason right?
I agree with the ruling, but this makes me wonder if it will be possible to have any AI agent at all if it's consistently applied.
After all, if I can get ChatGPT or Claude to say something false that should count too, right?
Due to costs of running frontier models on every search request, Google simply does not: the failure rate is so high when you are just expecting an objective output.
Imagine a search for your name resulted in an AI summary saying you are involved with child-trafficking because low capability model linked your first name and perhaps a couple articles on supporting children non-profits to it — and then offering that in a convincing sounding summary right at the top!
In normal flow yes, but likely not if you intentionally entrap it to say something wrong.
A disclaimer and couched language will probably fly through. And it's going to matter what expectations an user could reasonably have, too.
Companies generally are liable if their product doesn’t perform. No reason AI should be any different.
That’s not very typical in software. Especially software you don’t pay for (with money)
Google generated those content, so Google should be liable to its own product, that's different from the third party links they just simply gathered and displayed, totally different things. If you are a victim too, reply below.
I'm surprised this is even a thing. After all, you go to Google not for the truth, but to search Google. Since when is truthiness the "guarantee of service"?
You're not even paying for a google service, search is free... You might be the product, and your data, but you didn't directly pay for a service and they didn't sell you a fake service.
I'm not taking Google's side, this isn't about whether it's right or wrong to rob websites of traffic, this is about AI's returning search metadata.
But I'm surprised that they lost this argument, and the line they took in the first place.
The Internet isn't made of fact checked data, it's crowd sourced. How can anyone be liable?
That is exactly the point of the ruling, though... they are saying that AI summaries are NOT the same as search. If Google was just returning search results, and then users clicked on a website and read the content there, Google is not responsible for the content.
If instead Google gives you an answer right there on google.com, without going to another site, they ARE responsible for it.
That makes sense to me?
Not precisely. The issue at hand isn't just that Google displayed the AI summary, but that they authored it, making them responsible for its contents. If the defamatory content had been in a snippet in the search results, they would've been fine, because that clearly has another author who can be held responsible. The AI summary has no other author than Google; therefore, they're responsible for what it says.
(What's the alternative, after all? Having no one responsible for what the AI summary says is clearly untenable.)
why? tons of websites push misinformation intentionally. is there a truth requirement anywhere? i don’t get why this is a thing at all
What don’t you understand? Those websites that defame a company are liable for that defamation. In this case Google defamed a company in its AI summary and is this liable for that defamation.
So if I edit a Wikipedia article to share that consuming poison is safe and someone consumes poison after reading it… is Wikipedia legally liable?
> is Wikipedia legally liable?
Probably not, because it's a similar situation where Wikipedia is accumulating user provided content. And people know Wikipedia can be freely edited.
You, however, might be liable. It's your content.
No, because Wikimedia isn't responsible for the behavior of its editors.
> is Wikipedia legally liable?
Directly? Quite possibly. They'd then have to transfer that liability to you.
> is there a truth requirement anywhere?
Yes, and it's called defamation when you don't follow it.
There is absolutely a truth requirement.
This is why you have to say "I think this person is a murderer" and not "This person is a murderer."
One is opinion. One is fact.
This isn't super hard.
That's the difference between returning search results and interpreting the information and summarising them. If a newspaper says 'so-and-so has been arrested for theft' it's not the same as them summarising to 'so-and-so is a thief', the second is potentially libel. Why should Google be held to a different standard?
The title is misleading IMO. It should say "German ruling declares Google liable for libel in AI Overviews"
I was prepared to say the same thing as you but after reading it seems totally fair.
The key difference is that this would be illegal if a human wrote it too.
Google itself is more trustworthy from a normal person perspective as they use it a lot.
None of "AI" companies call their apps "Entertainment fun text generator". They are call them serious names, use words like "intrllegence" and "thinking".
So yeah I'd think if any of "AIs" start to recommend to drink some bleach or take a flight from a 10th floor window these companies should be liable.
I think it's very clear that Google's AI overviews go far beyond just searching Google because they often incorrectly compile sources to come up with an incorrect answer. For example of this look at the comment I made in this thread
I go to Google to search, but get spammed as if I wanted to talk to a chatbot (and a very poor quality chatbot at that).
This is a gigantic own goal for Google. The average person’s impression is that Google AI is much worse than ChatGPT, even though that’s not actually the case. Google is shoving a terrible model in everyone’s faces.
Playing the perception game wins you the perspective price.
Nothing is free. Google benefits off you when they show you search page. Either today (ads) or later
If companies can be held liable (in spite of very visible disclaimers, ToS, and usage policies) for the output of non-deterministic software, isn't this just a soft ban on the deployment of non-deterministic software?
> (in spite of very visible disclaimers, ToS, and usage policies)
If you sell food, in a food stall, labeled as food and you add a disclaimer that it is toxic and will make you sick. You are still selling toxic food and you are liable for it.
Google is pretending to give answers to your questions. They offer you a service about answering questions. And then they add a disclaimer "we do not answer questions just write bullshit". That is still fraud and Google should be liable for it.
> isn't this just a soft ban on the deployment of non-deterministic software?
Tetris is non-deterministic and it is not banned like millions of other programs. I do not follow you.
LLMs are deterministic, they are only non-deterministic when you add a temperature.
Where did it say the liability only applied to non-deterministic software?
no, just a ban on using non-deterministic software for situations where deterministic responses are expected.
Deterministic responses are not expected from something clearly labeled able to make mistakes.
What to do if the software automatically and wrongly libels you on a public search engine?
Honestly I can understand the ruling, but the side effects might be severe.
What constitutes a correct answer though?
Is something like,
"People online say that x y and z because a b c"
a credible, correct answer, even if it isn't because of a/b/c?
If people do say that, it's a true statement and thus fine. You are allowed to report that regardless of the truth of x/y/z/a/b/c
The instance of this ruling people apparently did not actually say any of the offending claims. 'The court also found that the AI overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results." None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these "the defendant's own statements."'
Certainly, if this is pointing to the actual pages where the actual people express these things. Otherwise that's equally unfalsifiable claims, could be completely made up or actual truth.
One way to formulate things that would be less would be "once support a time, in some fabulated world, it's not impossible that some imaginary character would say something following some reason." But then, of course this is not aligning the the deception scheme pushed by companies putting in their interface that the "machine is thinking hard for you".
One that doesn't maim/injure/kill you is a pretty good standard. And before you call bs, look at all the foraging and chemistry books that are for sale on Amazon that are AI.
why are those ai chemistry books any different than the anarchist cookbook which can also be bought on Amazon? actually now that I think about it a faulty chemistry book might be less dangerous than a book that teachers readers how to make explosives.
Just ban AI in search engine.
Anyone know if this ruling applies to answers generated by AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude?
All three have the ability to perform a web search, then compose a reply based on the search results. Pretty much the exact thing that Google AI Overview does. This ruling may make them liable for false answers.
> Pretty much the exact thing that Google AI Overview does.
No, the article implies the court’s logic is that the AI search results are presented as search results and that’s a big part of why they are liable. It seems like the court (again, according to the article) does not find the disclaimers that Google has slapped on the AI results compelling because again, it chose to represent these as a summary of search results and it is aware of the failure rate.
> The court also found that the AI overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results." None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these "the defendant's own statements."
> Google built the AI, Google offered it to users, so Google owns what it produces, "because it alone has influence over the AI's offering and the algorithms with which the AI operates."
Google does not, as a general rule, control the actual content of search results, but usually there’s a distinction between the ranking and presentation of the results vs. the actual content. In this case, the court is basically saying, “You sold this to people as a search summary, you know it might be full of crap and you chose to do it anyway. No, you don’t get to claim the equivalent of a US safe harbor defense.”
> You sold this to people as a search summary, you know it might be full of crap and you chose to do it anyway
There is a subtle difference in stating it as a search summary compared to an opinionated answer. Most users are always going to treat it as a response from google instead of search results where the user is still responsible for understanding and come up with their own interpretation.
This is probably the right step in some sense to make one liable for their statements/assertions.
Apparently, if they were search results, they wouldn't have been liable, since there's an exception to defamation laws. Without any exception, defamation is defamation, it doesn't matter how it's presented.
Yes, if it was that a search result returned a defamatory article that Google had nothing to do with outside of indexing, it is likely they would not be found liable. The court is clearly trying to make a distinction that the AI search results are produced by Google and thus they can make an editorial decision on whether to publish it despite knowing that it is potentially defamatory.
Google does remove defamatory results I believe at least partially in response to being sued. However there is a distinction if they have been informed it is defamatory.
This ruling was about search clearly, however, there's definitely ways implications for chatbots too.
I don't see any reason why it wouldn't.
Google generated those content, so Google should be liable to its own product, that's different from the third party links they just simply gathered and displayed, totally different things. I wonder how many victims are there now.
We should be teaching people to be cynical of AI answers.
Even if the answers are correct, they could still be biased, incomplete, misleading, and all the other media-literacy things people should be looking out for.
This ruling seems to go the opposite direction; 'I am legally obliged to give correct answers, so I am always right, trust the AI'.
I have a business where our support email is recommended when people are searching for how to cancel a completely unrelated scam subscription that is showing up on their bank or credit card charges. We get emails almost daily from confused people.
Doesn't libel require to be deliberate? Ie you can't sue for libel if the author admits a mistake and corrects it?
It requires the claim to be made with "willful disregard for the truth". Notifying someone, especially with a cease-and-desist on fancy letterhead, makes it legally clear that they know better, and thereafter would be definitely libelling you (assuming the claims are in fact untrue and harmful). But you can still sue them for the claim prior to the notice, you just have to prove they should have known better prior to making the claim.
In this case it looks like they were notified and didn't do anything.
That's just America.
Some digital matters concern the state and others are private and there should be no sovereignty of the state over private matters.
Who will adjudicate private disputes between citizens if not the state?
Does this extend to ads displayed in search results? Because they absolutely should be liable for the scams they advertise also.
> Does this extend to ads displayed in search results?
Probably not, for the same reason search results aren't an issue.
I've found a fun and pretty reliable way to get Gemini to output incorrect information: Ask for a chapter by chapter summary of a book.
I first tried it to remind me of what happened in a previous book in a series that I was reading. When I realized it was either misstating plot points or straight up hallucinating, I tried it on a bunch more books to amuse myself.
Older classics are of course more accurate, but for newer or less popular books Gemini won't shy away from giving you a summary culled from misinterpreted Reddit threads and Goodreads reviews. It's like getting a secondhand account from someone who talked to another person who had read the book a long time ago. You get the general gist of it, but with some added flavor.
Even if you upload an entire epub of a book, the results aren't stellar. Rather than a Cliffs Note's quality summary, they're pretty sparse or leave out important bits of information. One chapter summary I got back made a point of describing what one of the characters was wearing, even though it had absolutely zero to do with anything else. Yes, that's technically a "summary", but not quite my tempo.
If Google wants to present summaries of websites in anything more than a very, very superficial description, they're going to have to improve their model's ability to understand context and importance. In theory, a novel is a self-contained bundle of text, so pulling accurate information out of it should be straight forward. A website is naturally going to be way more of a challenge.
All that said, I find the AI summaries from Google/Gemini to be quite useful and a time saver, but I know to always double check something if it's at all important.
So stupid. What is this with making perfect the enemy of good. You can never guarantee the output of an LLM does that mean Germany does get to use them?
EU countries continuing to ensure the conditions for their future economic competitivity
mr prime minister, we cannot allow an "automatic libel machine" gap!
Their digital sovereignty