361–370 of 587 posts
The ruling also lessened the free speech rights for AI. This is a big one. In conjunction with holding an operator liable for its AI's doings, that will lead to interesting cases where conduct that would have been previously protected under free speech rights will become a liability. Basically, machine-based cognitive capability becomes a liability when it is customer-facing.
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.
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…
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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 we…
https://www.startribune.com/google-ai-overview-lawsuit-defam...
Previous cases in this space (eg Meta v KGM, Walters v OpenAI) have not turned on Section 230 specifically.
The second these things came on the scene and confidently spoke lies at times, I knew this sort of lawsuit would be inevitable. Nice to see Germany got it right.
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.
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.
e.g. The failed marketing of A&W's third-pounder burger as so many people (in the USA) didn't believe that it was bigger than a quarter-pounder.
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…
Well, for cars anyway, the manufacturer was always liable for the car doing something wrong (example: driver changes the volume on the radio, and that disables the brakes).
It's just that techbros want an exception to this rule if the car is self-driving.
I see no reason for an exception to this rule.
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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.
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…
Google does not get routinely sued.
Yes, Lawyers send takedown requests to Google.
Google sends the reviewer a message and ask for a statement. If you provide one. They will check it and decide whether they seem it defamation or not.
However, Google doesn't verify shit. Even if you send them proof of a purchase or visit and your message is objectively a opinion (not defamation) they will take it down. Why? I assume because they really don't care about individual reviews and rather spare the time and money and just take the comment down.
Google changing their review displays is Google's decision. It has NOTHING to do with any threat of being sued.
They could actually leave the review up when it's not defamatory but they simply don't want to invest the time to validate it or risk leaving a potentially defamatory review online.
And the legal threat is without proof, so why would you even bring it up. OP could have simply posted the letter. They didn't wich makes this completely unprovable
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You cannot get sued for a review just because it's lower than 5 stars. But of course if you write something like "I found a dead cockroach in my pizza", or "I hard that they don't clean the dishes enough" in a review without proof, that's defamation. And it doesn't matter if you give 1 or 5 stars with the review.
I wrote a one star review and posted pictures of a badly burnt pizza served at a restaurant in Berlin. Google sent me an email telling me they removed that because the restaurant filed a defamation claim
If I get it correctly I like the ruling. So Google has established a product called Search. For that product rules have been established. Google has monopolized that product. Now Google is replacing that product with a new product. But they keep calling it the same thing. Because they want to keep their monopoly. That is what has been deemed illegal. Gemini is not illegal. Pretending the worst version of Gemini is Se…
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Something like this happened to me too, for what it's worth. I wrote a completely factual description of my bad experience with a shop, and then got a nasty notice from Google that my review was being taken down because of a defamation claim. I looked up how this works, and I found ads for law firms that specialize in removing bad reviews. They charge a set price for each review they remove. As a regular consumer, yo…