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German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

the-decoder.com

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Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#161

Post by broken-kebab »

SllX wrote: post #93
em-bee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unles…

Important for whom exactly? If it's you who are called convicted pedo by Google AI summary, it's you who has vital interest in additional research but not me who reads it. There's intentions mismatch. Which probably would destroy your life, and you won't call it "entertainment" then, I think.

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#162

Post by NitpickLawyer »

andrewmutz wrote: post #101
Swizec wrote: post #18

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 la…

> 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.

I doubt that will be the case, because of the long tail problem. (same with self driving cars and other ML related problems).

In fact, we have counter-examples today. Newspapers (even reputable ones) can't get it right every time, despite the fact that they have both trained people and in theory they're setup to catch that w/ reporters - fact checkers - editors. And still, from time to time, they get it wrong. (and I'm not talking about purposefully getting it wrong, just honest mistakes.)

What will likely happen with a ruling like this is that the answers will be hedged and legalesed and muddied up the wazoo.

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#163

Post by l23k4 »

Wow, you guys really think this is good?

Because of the same rules, German restaurants also get to pick and choose which reviews stay up. They can literally take down any specific reviews they like.

A restaurant that mostly gets 1 star reviews will still show up with 5 stars on Google maps, as they will simply delete the reviews with less than 5 stars as defamatory.

Here's a couple of examples:

https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1peujau/google_rev...

https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/18z4shs/legal_thre...

https://www.reddit.com/r/frankfurt/comments/1lox7ha/bad_revi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1iiaco8/restaurant...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskGermany/comments/1ha7sxf/why_do_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1t613w7/it_was_fin...

https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1l98608/threatenin...

https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1sw34jc/can_you_ge...

https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1sw34jc/can_you_ge...

https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/10kmn66/writing_an...

tl;dr Germans are particularly bad at coming up with reasonable rules to handle these situations

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#164

Post by l23k4 »

kg wrote: post #28
Heirlomb wrote: post #21

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?

Not all disputes need to be adjudicated. It's undoubtedly a fact that the German concept of "defamation" primarily relates to situations that should never be adjudicated by any third party.

Genuinely, by far the most common situation where claims of defamation arise in Germany is any less than 5 star review left to a business on google maps.

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#165

Post by Gigachad »

SllX wrote: post #93
em-bee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unles…

If google didn't intend it's answers to be taken at face value it would just present the citations in a list of links rather than generating an answer.

Obviously the marketing point of the AI tools is it just gives you an answer straight up so you don't have to bother reading normal sources.

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#166

Post by Gigachad »

thisisit wrote: post #123
heathrow83829 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rig…

Google can be reasonably expected to not push pirated content to top if someone is searching for the “big hit music download” because they might be held liable for helping people with illegal downloads. But they shouldn’t be liable for misleading people? Being sued for billions of dollars by corporations vs millions by common folks is the difference

There's also a difference between search engine results and this. Google is publishing their own text with false claims, not linking to another page that hosts it.

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#167

Post by gblargg »

sham1 wrote: post #156
gblargg wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To remove the choice from responsible people who can understand that LLM answers are not to be trusted with anything important?

If our standard for laws would be that "well no reasonable person would do this/believe this" then nothing would be illegal, there'd be no need to label any product as potentiality harmful, etc. Do you really want to go there? That everything in the world would have a literal "caveat emptor" attached to it?

I thought Google labeled its AI summary with a disclaimer already. I don't want companies to be forced to only offer safe-for-children services.

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#168

Post by Gigachad »

gmerc wrote: post #99

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.

I've also observed that the AI summary on the google search page is incredibly stupid compared to the results in the actual Gemini. The Google search AI is like the dumbest lightest model simply rewording the search results. It will take a random reddit comment, strip it from it's context and present it as absolute fact.

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#169

Post by sheiyei »

mmmpetrichor wrote: post #137

This makes sense to me. AI is amazing tech, but it's being oversold to naive public, either on the back of hype, or cynically, knowing they can do it with inpunity, (I'm not sure which). HN users have a way better than average grasp of what AI is and we can be skeptical of results, the general public has no clue.

100% cynically. It's a game of infinite money glitch (also known as "grab as much as you can before it's over") and has been at least since GPT-3.

Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

#170

Post by bloppe »

andrewmutz wrote: post #101
Swizec wrote: post #18

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 la…

Most of the time, human beings driving cars with their own hands and eyeballs are not "liable" for their errors (unless they can be proven negligent or drunk), unless you count their insurance going up. Most car accidents do not end with anybody getting arrested, or sued, or anything like that. Insurance pays out, premiums go up, case closed.

If Waymo can be proven negligent or something, then sure, bleed em dry. But as long as they're acting in good faith and significantly reducing overall road fatalities per mile driven, I think it's actually pretty unreasonable to try to hold them to such a high standard you end up subjecting society to more of the higher fatality rates caused by humans.

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