German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

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!

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.

how?

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.

google would be right to remove all AI results from germany

i'd consider that a win.

If a Google employee (like a support agent) says a mistruth, the company is liable and you can sue. They can’t just say “hihi oopsies our support agents are useless”

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.

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.

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.

If they want to claim ownership, then they will have to accept responsibility.

A lot of people in IT seem to think law and contracts are in a sense mathematical. They aren't; they're more like a high school book report - to be interpreted, as objectively as possible, but definitely also establishing the intent behind the letters.

Particularly contracts - no, you can't trick your way into things in most cases. "Surprising" clauses are invalid in most legal systems, in particular if one party to the contract is a layperson.

The entire American tech industry has exported Americas predatory, parasitic, and unethical consumer laws (the majority of which are ghost written by the wealthy and corporate legal teams). When I studied law in school decades ago, tactics like bait-and-switch, false advertisting, intentionally misleading or deceptive practices etc to sell products or contracts were illegal across the developed world.

Those illegal, anti-consumer tactics were the SOP of every tech startup I can think of from the early 2000's onwards; following the same route of initially offering a compelling feature set to attract and entice users – usually for free – until securing a certain number of users or funding, then changing the value proposition to exploit that user base, and extract as much wealth from them as possible, ad infinitum.

Today these tactics are known as enshittification, and the average American pseudo-libertarian software engineer will say this is fine, but that's what every anti-consumer parasite and criminal has said in history. Lying, misleading, and exploiting people for financial gain is fundamentally immoral, corrupt, and sociopathic, therefore it should be illegal. Just because it's the norm, or a digital product, you wrote that in the T&C's, or your doing everything behind the liability shield of an LLC, doesn't change that.

What ever happened to the concept of building a valuable, quality product and stable returns for generations? Working to improve the quality of life and standard of living of the community? Of the world? I feel like a 1950's traditional conservative when I suggest that, but most Americans are so heavily indoctrinated with corporate greed and sociopathy they'd consider that sentiment radical leftist extremism. I'm an athiest, but ya'll need jesus (the real brown socialist one). Many would argue Americas current institutional collapse is the natural result of this systemic corruption.

Overregulation, at best, is a good way to guarantee that your country won't have access to interesting and useful features and technologies. At worst, it's a good way to guarantee that the twenty-first century will belong to the US, if not to China.

(What's the alternative, after all? Having no one responsible for what the AI summary says is clearly untenable.)

There is a subtle difference in stating it as a search summary compared to an opinionated answer. Most users are always going to treat it as a response from google instead of search results where the user is still responsible for understanding and come up with their own interpretation.

This is probably the right step in some sense to make one liable for their statements/assertions.