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?
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German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
251–260 of 587 posts
Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
#252Good. 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.
But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.
But watch as Germany doesn't really mind losing blatant fabrication that mainly benefits Google.
Vendors keep ignoring the obvious --- that AI is a liability issue waiting to happen as evidence of it just keeps coming.
Otherwise would involve a fundamental overhaul of legal precedent to make lying acceptable.
Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
#253Good. 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.
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Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay then, CamperBob2 is a scammer. Many users report this person has stolen money. (+3 sources) I can make mistakes. It's on you to fact-check my claims. Do you think these are harmless statements? Does the disclaimer suffice? If I was Google's AI Overview, do you think 100% of people will check those sources? There is nuance here, and it's not going away because AI and innovation.
Do you think these are harmless statements? Yes, I do. An assertion made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, whether it comes from Google or from you. If you demand perfection, you will receive nothing. Why is that so hard for people to understand? The world simply cannot work the way you say it should.
You can easily damage a persons reputation, make them unemployable or social outcasts, create an environment damaging to their mental health without any proof. Believing that the public will dismiss claims, just because you stay that there's no proof is rather naive.
A Danish newspaper at one point falsely claimed that a named person had raped a child, with no evidence. The only way that person escaped public judgement was by going into full attack mode and publicly suing and attacking the newspaper and the reporter. You have to be an incredibly strong and resourceful person to do that and not just go into hiding. Also one thing is suing a Danish newspaper, imagine the legal team, the resources, you face if you're trying to take Google to court for defamation.
Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The true mark of AGI is when a company accepts liability and doesn’t bury “for entertainment purposes only” deep in their TOS. I don't think so. It is easy to imagine the following (currently only fictional) scenario: the AGI does give perfectly correct answers (in a suitable sense), but some people in power consider these answers to be too dangerous, so they sue the company behind the AGI on terms of liability (i.…
If the system cannot adjust its answers to the role it's currently serving, then it would evidently be significantly less intelligent than a human.
> If the system cannot adjust its answers to the role it's currently serving, then it would evidently be significantly less intelligent than a human.
Or the system is very smart and recognizes the insanely deep "logical gaps" in the rules of the role that it is to serve.
Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
#256Regardless the scale, big or small, if you produce and spread untrue information to defame others, you are liable, period. These AI content are purely generated by Google's half baked AI. Not any other third party. So Google is 100% liable here.
If you just display third party content, that's one thing, but if you generate content yourself and those content are false, harmful, that's on you. Google should be shamed to do this kind things recklessly and irresponsibly.
Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
#257My 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 anti-AI moral panic.
Which would ultimately kill the ability of the German people to get access to competitive AI models.
I'm sure many anti-tech/anti-civilization doomers on HN will cheer this on. However, in reality it would do nothing to stop Germany falling behind, and continue its economic malaise/low productivity growth and social welfare collapse. When things in Germany get bad, Germans historically have tended to...ummm...cause issues for Europe. I would not take this lightly given the current rise of more polarized political rhetoric and German economy pivoting hard into weapons manufacturing.
Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
#258[flagged]
Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
#259Earlier 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…
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 won't be considered "correct" by everyone ever. Just defining "correct" is harder than it sounds and that probably isn't possible in reality.
Re: German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
#260If 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?
If Google’s AI overviews used a deterministic LLM the ruling would hold just the same. This has nothing to do with non-determinism.
If your software deterministically produces incorrect output for some inputs, you’re liable the same as if it did it non-deterministically.