Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

the-decoder.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 587 posts

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

#111

Post by OtomotO »

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…

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.

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

#112

Post by Robotbeat »

em-bee wrote: post #73
missedthecue wrote: post #64

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?

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.

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

#113

Post by pdpi »

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…

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.

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

#114

Post by NegativeK »

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…

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.

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

#115

Post by novemp »

Robotbeat wrote: post #108
Frieren wrote: post #81

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 achiev…

Should we hold scientists and journalists liable if they say false things or misrepresent things?

Yes, obviously.

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

#116

Post by Swizec »

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…

> 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!

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

#117

Post by 8note »

thfuran wrote: post #109
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…

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.

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

#118

Post by cik »

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…

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.

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

#119

Post by moi2388 »

missedthecue wrote: post #64

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?

LLMs are deterministic, they are only non-deterministic when you add a temperature.

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

#120

Post by em-bee »

Robotbeat wrote: post #112
em-bee wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it's not clearly labeled. it's a search engine. i expect deterministic responses from that.
Post reply on HN