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German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

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

#321

Post by SllX »

isaacfrond wrote: post #238
SllX wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those are things you legitimately care about before you spend one penny on a T-Shirt, then you are. Or you did your research before hand. Or you’re just not buying the T-Shirt. Or you don’t care about those things at all, and you will buy the T-Shirt that’s in front of you right now rather than wait later and buy one that better reflects your supposed values when you’ve done an appropriate amount of research. Usin…

You are confusing who is the party that is injured--as many in this thread are. We are not talking about the consumer who buys a non-fairtrade t-shirt, when he would rather had a fairtrade one. It's about the t-shirt producers who is legitimately fairtrade but whose business is now in the shitter because of a lying AI.

LLMs can’t lie. They are incapable of telling either the truth or lying. To the extent that they are in any way useful, it’s recognizing that they are text generators attached to crawlers and other tools that can with the right inputs produce useful generated text that may also incidentally be correct or incorrect.

Businesses might (well, will) suffer because people are misusing AI, but it is a misuse to do anything with it without an additional verification step.

To be clear here, I have no issue with Google taking it on the chin in cases like this, but what the comment I was originally responding to had this:

> 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.

And my point is this: if it matters, verification is not optional. If it doesn’t matter, then fine, skip the verification step, but if you’re taking whatever text is generated by a GPT at face value without understanding what that is or being able to determine the source inputs for the “claims” it outputs, then you’re part of the problem because sometimes the source is just a GPT-generated web page, and that’s obviously not trustworthy. Sometimes it’s a MediaWiki site page that doesn’t actually exist, but because it’s MediaWiki it’s not going to return a 404. Using a tool requires understanding it including its failure modes, and in the case of LLMs that means: trust nothing, verify everything.

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

#322

Post by pembrook »

kevinxsun wrote: post #279
pembrook wrote: post #257

My feelings about this rest of the scope of liability. From my understanding, Google is now liable if making false claims about a personal/business reputation. I like this idea in theory (key word). However, I can easily see the slippery slope where in practice this means providing any AI response becomes too risky, and it becomes another money club used to extract wealth from big tech due to the current hysterical a…

It is not anti-AI, it is anti misusing AI. Clearly you are trying to manipulate the situation here. If your AI is half baked and produce garbages, you should be liable for the damage of those garbages, that applies to any product or service on this planet, not only just AI.If your product or service is defect, that causes harm, you are liable.

I agree with this, in theory.

But to loudly proclaim your love for this idea as most have here seems a bit premature given there are potentially massive downsides to applying legal liability to an AI model, if not done extremely carefully.

I'm just trying to move a bit beyond the emotional first order thinking. You might see this as manipulation if you love just swimming in emotional vibes, but I find this website becoming quite boring lately due to the lack of debate beyond this first-order thinking.

As someone living in Europe, watching a bunch of rich American engineers fanboy European over-regulation which they aren't actually being subjected to, is super cringe. It's the epitome of the principal-agent problem.

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

#323

Post by emsign »

3ot wrote: post #307
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HNer gets a legal threat after saying that he didn't like a doctor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44734895 This post is written by an LLM, and possibly a complete fabrication.

Yeah, I agree about the LLM part. But can confirm from personal experience that businesses threaten to sue based on Google Maps reviews.

Please don't use fabricated anecdotes in replacement for your own anecdotes. That doesn't make your argument more trustworthy but doesthe opposite.

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

#324

Post by polyamid23 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #155
oaiey wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is shown to millions, everyone who is interested in you, they are factually not fact checking and you can do nothing against it. It can destroy you. You are analyzing this on the assumption that people are rational and have capacity to do the check. They have neither.

(Shrug) That sounds like their problem, if they reflexively believe everything Google's AI tells them. No one I respect, care for, or work with would believe such a thing without additional justification. Anyone who does accept Google's AI output blindly will soon find that their mistaken opinion of CamperBob2 is the least of their problems. There is a reason Google goes (well) out of their way to warn people that th…

I don't know about that. Imagine I want to sort people into employable and unemployable based on AI summaries. After filtering the employable pile is large enough. You being in the unemployeable pile and me accepting it blindly, is not my problem. If there is any at all.

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

#325

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#326

Post by lolc »

_ink_ wrote: post #273

I don't fully understand it. Are they liable for content made up by their AI? Or are they now liable for content written by others and summed up (correctly) by their AI?

From my reading the German court's ruling is that Google are responsible both for claims they made up and claims they rephrase from somewhere else. Because the claims appear as a statement of fact made by Google. If they showed it as "User X on site Y claims Z" they would not be held responsible. Because that's how search engines are understood to work. If they make a wrong quote, they would be responsible for that though.

So my understanding is their unreliable AI summaries are a legal liability for Google in Germany and people can request corrections through the courts.

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

#327

Post by tempfile »

dgellow wrote: post #291
Saline9515 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be noted that defamation law has a very low threshold in Germany, to the point that businesses routinely sue Google Maps users for less-than-5-stars reviews. Google had to change their display of reviews because of this. Three stars review is taken down for "libel": https://support.google.com/maps/thread/367778263/google-maps... HNer gets a legal threat after saying that he didn't like a doctor: https://new…

Damn, that makes public facing LLMs a horrible liability

Public-facing LLMs are a horrible liability.

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

#329

Post by waysa »

It makes sense to me.

When Google Search is quoting a 3rd-party website that happens to have bad information, that's not on them. Blame shifts to the 3rd-party. This is Google's privilege being a search engine.

When Google operates as an answer machine instead of a search engine, the privelege doesn't apply anymore. There's no 3rd-party to take the blame.

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

#330

Post by fauigerzigerk »

Hfuffzehn wrote: post #275
brainwad wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with monopolies. Google was protected from defamation law with search because the page title and snippets were direct quotes from the linked result page. Whereas with AI overviews, the copy is written by a Google-controlled LLM.

Yes, the monopoly is not relevant for the court. It is relevant for Google though, because they want to transfer it to another product. And the court is saying that whatever that new product is, Google is not allowed to mislead the public by pretending it is search.

I'm not sure. Is it really just the misleading part that the court takes issue with, i.e portraying Gemini output as a search result?

In my view, the ruling could mean that Gemini's output is legally seen as first-person speech by Google regardless of where it is published.

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