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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

#261

Post by josefx »

hanwenn wrote: post #147

Curiously, if you look for "geramond verlag betrugsmasche", or "verlagshaus24 betrugsmasche", it will now tell you that there are no indications it is a scam, but "significant organizational problems and extremely bad customer support lead to (list of bad experiences)". Also, each purported fact now has a direct link to the source of the fact, that is more clearly visible than the previous chain icon.

The result I get has an entire section dedicated to scammers using the company name. The only links in that section go to a wikipedia page that doesn't mention any scams and a police help page that doesn't mention the company.

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

#262

Post by kevinxsun »

heathrow83829 wrote: post #63
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.

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…

At the scale that google is at, is the exact the reason they need to be hold accountable for any misconduct because the impact is so big. If google just display third party content only, then yes, users need to use their own judgement. But if google itself generate content instead and put out claims, due to it's scale and reputation, those content needs to be true because most of the people put trust in Google, so any untrue or false information especially defame others, Google is 100% liable, period. You clearly don't have the clear mind or mental capacity to analyze this situation, probably very slow.

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

#263

Post by hunterpayne »

Gigachad wrote: post #184
SllX wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI summary is still useful for narrowing down the results, even if you fully check the citations. > 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. To lazy people yes. That would be a marketing point. It’s not that though, so you use it to save time, but you don’t get to skip the verification step.

Google should not be publishing a statement that they haven't verified. This is different to listing search results links, they are the ones publishing the content here. A journalist could not make up a harmful statement about someone and get away by saying the readers should have all read the sources. AI companies want to take all the benefits and profits, while holding none of the liability and responsibility for t…

"A journalist could not make up a harmful statement about someone and get away by saying the readers should have all read the sources."

Journalists do that all the time. We even have a whole collection of words to describe it. Muckraking for instance is probably about 100 years old. Its even in the Google auto-complete in the browser I am posting from.

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

#264

Post by layer8 »

tristanj wrote: post #5

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.

If an AI chatbot would consistently defame a particular company, I’m pretty sure they would be liable too.

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

#265

Post by somenameforme »

csomar wrote: post #159
keithnz wrote: post #140

The irony of an article that makes a false claim about what Google was found liable for.... and that very few are fact checking it :) The law they broke was a law protecting personal and business reputation against false statements of fact. Essentially no one can say I might be wrong, check yourself, but X is Y if that claim is essentially defamatory. This is pretty good, I hope googles approach is to make sure they…

How much does Germany follow case law? If this could set a precedent, it's worth noting that anyone can generate these AI overview responses and they're wrong like 9 times out of 10 only.

It seems like this would ostensibly be illegal in most places. The reason e.g. social media sites in the US can post whatever and not be libel is because of section 230, but that only applies to user generated content. It's the reason that e.g. newspapers can be sued for publishing libelous/defamatory/etc content, yet the same author of such can post it on social media and those sites are legally immune. Kind of a weird law - especially given contemporary censorship regimes, but it's easy to understand the motivation.

But if you as a first party are publishing something directly, like Google is here, you're generally liable for what it says.

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

#266

Post by zkmon »

The confusion is due to blurring of distinction between the roles: Tool, Tool user and Tool provider. Traditionally, a human-agent who can have an intent and trigger an action is held liable for the consequences of the actions, not the tool. That human agent can be the tool user or tool provider.

Tool user is liable in the case of misuse unintended purpose of the tool.

Tool provider is liable when the use of the tool, by design, causes unintended effects despite proper use of the tool.

A simple "AI may make mistakes" line under the box will not help while the box contains false information. The specific information (lines or words) should not be provided if that's a mistake of false.

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

#267

Post by account42 »

heathrow83829 wrote: post #63
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.

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…

Should google also be allowed to assasinate a couple of people per day due to their scale? If they can't manage liability at their scale they they should scale down.

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

#268

Post by watwut »

hunterpayne wrote: post #259
pdpi wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 defama…

The other big point is that some people treat LLMs as if they are truth. We all know that they get a lot wrong, a lot of the time. Yesterday I watch both Elon post something somewhere between badly worded and wrong and another user used Grok to "prove him wrong", but this time being completely wrong in a different way. And this was a matter of law which can be looked up. Anything within throwing distance of politics…

I see people claiming LLM are trustworthy on HN all the time.

It is not just some people, it is a lot of people insode the tech itself pushing the "trustworthy" claim.

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

#269

Post by phatfish »

gblargg wrote: post #145
chias wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a win win to me

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

I have to fight with my family members when they "Google" something, read the top AI slop result, and I ask which page it came from. They believe what is on the Google landing page, and actually I don't think that is a naive assumption. Google has pushed itself as the information oracle, now they are delivering slop as the first result. It's a bait and switch.

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

#270

Post by account42 »

oaiey wrote: post #138
8note wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But we agree that this was also wrong, right?

Yeah its wild to see people actually using "kill a million people and its a statistic" as a defense rather than to point out injustice.
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