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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

#511

Post by throwaway27448 »

ben_w wrote: post #314
throwaway27448 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The true mark of AGI Can we just trash this as a marketing term? If/when AGI arrives there will be no point quibbling over competency. What we are looking at is just bad search results

"No quibble" is more a mark of ASI than AGI; while both are easily coopted as marketing terms[0], "smarter than all humans" is harder to dispute than "general intelligence" (can do some graduate level work, can't drive well enough to render steering wheels obsolete, is it general?) [0] e.g. Zuckerberg: https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/

> "smarter than all humans" is harder to dispute

I don't think this is the case. It's not clear intelligence is a coherent concept to begin with, let alone a one-dimensional thing you can maximize. What, is it going to write stageplays that puts shakespeare to shame? Find a way to enforce world peace or end greed? I'm not at all convinced we anything more than the simple competency we expect from humans is possible. What would we look for to know it's there?

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

#512

Post by JamesSwift »

boringg wrote: post #402
Hfuffzehn wrote: post #220

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…

I mean was google search responsible for surfacing correct answers? I am not a defend of AI but this seems like a weird piece of legislation.

> was google search responsible for surfacing correct answers

No, as the article lays out, google hallucinated facts that werent present in source material and so at that point the court found them liable for that.

Previous protections existed for search because it has been argued (and agreed) that they are merely a vessel for showing the content to the user. But when they begin to editorialize and reword the content to show their own version of the content (the AI summary) those protections dont apply even if the AI summary is shown in the same UI as search.

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

#513

Post by rtkwe »

nonethewiser wrote: post #490
rtkwe wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a world where AI results aren't reasonably considered the output of the company. They're minced and sausagified regurgitations but they're not the original sources either.

Yeah, but my point is: what does that have to do with monopolies changing their services? And to continue your thought, what does that imply about copyright of training data? If Google is authoring the output it seems harder to argue they are ripping someone else off. It really seems like a tightrope to say google is publishing their own opinion but their opinion is also just someone else's work.

> Yeah, but my point is: what does that have to do with monopolies changing their services?

Not much really other than it being a change of category from pure search surfacing other's speech to their crummy new chatbot input with search underneath. GP was just mistaken that this was in any way related to their quasi-monopolistic position.

> If Google is authoring the output it seems harder to argue they are ripping someone else off.

They still pirated a lot of the training material, it's not like they went and licensed copies of all the books they used in the inputs. Even discounting all the publicly available data on the internet and the models recreating things word for word a lot of the books etc they ingested are illegal copies.

> like a tightrope to say google is publishing their own opinion but their opinion is also just someone else's work.

It's a grey area for sure between remixing and blatant copying that changes depending on the precise output. But it's inarguable imo that they consumed and ingested the work of basically every digitized word humans have ever written for their own profit without an ounce of compensation for the original authors. Copyright is full of these grey lines though like fair use doctrine, it's incredibly difficult to define in a systematic way what distinguishes transformative and non transformative works for example.

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

#514

Post by pesus »

WarmWash wrote: post #453
jqpabc123 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it’s ridiculous to create liability for AI chatbots. Liability isn't being *created* here, it has existed legally for a very long time. False information can cause real harm --- and the legal burden of proof is on the source. Search engines were provided legal exemption on the basis that they were simply quoting/referencing 3rd party sources who where legally liable for the content. LLM chatbots legally exceed these…

AI overviews cites it's sources though...

And often still makes claims that completely contradict those sources it's "citing".

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

#515

Post by benoau »

WarmWash wrote: post #457
mrweasel wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 judgeme…

Yeah, but imagine showing up in court with an AI overview as your only source for the defamation.

It worked this time!

Also in a similar vein Apple pulled a feature real fast last year when it was doing something similar to BBC news summaries -

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/01/06/bbc-calls-out-apple-ai-...

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

#516

Post by InitialLastName »

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

No more of a horrible liability than a human writing public-facing copy.

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

#517

Post by dcrazy »

Ravus wrote: post #442
dcrazy wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you speaking about the law in Germany? Truth is not an absolute defense to libel in all countries.

I can vouch for what you're saying - Italy is a jurisdiction in which truth is not a defense, for instance. Truthful statement seem to be a defense for Germany, though. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...

I’m not a lawyer, much less a German lawyer, but it does seem to my lay eyes that this is true of “malicious gossip.” But what is “insult”?

> Section 192

> Insult despite proof of the truth

> Proof of the truth of the asserted or disseminated fact does not preclude punishment in accordance with section 185 if the insult results from the form of the assertion or dissemination or the circumstances under which it was made.

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

#519

Post by dijksterhuis »

luke5441 wrote: post #382
Saline9515 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple people report that comments such as "Service was slow", or three star rating without comment were removed. If Google started to show how many reviews were removed, it was because the lawfare started to seriously affect the ratings.

Yes, Google just removes them as a first step because this is the least amount of work for them. Theoretically there is an Google appeals process. After that it needs to go to court. My guess is that often reviews are generalizing (easy mistake to make). E.g. they say "service is slow", when they should say: "When I was there on Thursday at noon service was slow for my table".

[dead]

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

#520

Post by alterom »

abustamam wrote: post #386
luke5441 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Google just removes them as a first step because this is the least amount of work for them. Theoretically there is an Google appeals process. After that it needs to go to court. My guess is that often reviews are generalizing (easy mistake to make). E.g. they say "service is slow", when they should say: "When I was there on Thursday at noon service was slow for my table".

When reading a review, it should always be assumed that it is based off of one "visit". A negative review will probably never have more than a few visits and if they do they'd normally say "I used to come here a lot but after new ownership service sucks!"

> it should always be assumed

Who dictates the "should”?

The German law simply removes the need to assume anything.

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