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 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 lawsuits. Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.
I doubt that will be the case, because of the long tail problem. (same with self driving cars and other ML related problems).
In fact, we have counter-examples today. Newspapers (even reputable ones) can't get it right every time, despite the fact that they have both trained people and in theory they're setup to catch that w/ reporters - fact checkers - editors. And still, from time to time, they get it wrong. (and I'm not talking about purposefully getting it wrong, just honest mistakes.)
What will likely happen with a ruling like this is that the answers will be hedged and legalesed and muddied up the wazoo.
This doesn’t sound convincing. What AI and what company?
LLMs don’t seem like they will ever be reliable like that.
Self driving like waymo might be?
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!
The “AI can make mistakes” kind of disclaimers they hide in the corner don’t really cut it
What sounds like a win to me. I certainly hope my country makes it dangerous for companies to break the law and/or harm the public with shitty products that aren't ready to be released legally/safely.
Well.. I mean.. yeah? I don't think this is as bad as you think it is.
Have you looked at SV and its product offerings recently? It's mostly just enshittified gamified value extraction that doesn't respect the user at all.
"If you do not let us do all this the way we want, we will take away your ability to use our shit" hits different when the "shit" in that sentence is actually just "shit".
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.
for now only volvo accepts liability, and only for "slow crawl mode"
Let someone else sacrifice the safety of their populace.
Heck - self driving is the fastest way to authoritarian government in practice. I’m surprised more people on HN haven’t cottoned on to that fact.
A self driving system will naturally build networks to share road state.
This network will eventually shift over to the government having the ability to manage how traffic should move during emergencies.
And at that point the government can easily decide where your car should go.
The inevitability of this outcome is blindingly obvious.
It’s highly beneficial to let other nations experiment and simply be followers.
If Waymo can be proven negligent or something, then sure, bleed em dry. But as long as they're acting in good faith and significantly reducing overall road fatalities per mile driven, I think it's actually pretty unreasonable to try to hold them to such a high standard you end up subjecting society to more of the higher fatality rates caused by humans.
That would be a boon for Germany in my book. If you wanted AI results you could go use an AI.
It's fine to have Gemini as an option, it's also fine to have a combined result page, that should just be something people are able to chose if they want that (even persistently if they want). It should just not be the default.
When I search, I want to see search results. When I ask AI, I want to ask AI. Combining the two into one is a disaster.
Mercedes-Benz does this in limited cases. Waymo does it generally. (In China, Level 4 and 5 transfers risk to the manufacturer. This is the correct way to do it.)
> AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses
If they want to claim ownership, then they will have to accept responsibility.
Self-driving cars don't need to be particularly good for companies to make models where they accept liability in some circumstances, and the cars refuse to drive in other circumstances.
Time to set my VPN location to Germany. I'm tired of the "udm" trick.
https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s
in your address bar once?
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).
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.e. the company is liable if the AGI gives answers that those in power don't like and which these people consider to be too dangerous for the public to know).
Oh no! Anyway ...
Otherwise most of it would not even exist.
Everyone would have continued paying out the nose to the IBM’s of the world year after year (who had unusual willingness to sign short ambiguously worded custom contracts to their own disadvantage, if paid vast amounts of money).
And be on mainframes to this very day… maybe Y combinator and HN wouldnt even exist in that world.
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.
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.
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
[0] e.g. Zuckerberg: https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/
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 bounds by fabricating info/content on their own ---data that does not exist elsewhere. This is a liability issue waiting to happen as there is no other responsible party/source to blame.
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.
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 right to remove all AI results from germany.
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”
I, too, agree that google is too large and should be broken up into multiple smaller companies.
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.
As others already said, that would be a great outcome, and german citizens would benefit.
It is a search engine. It used to have decent excerpts. It doesn't need hallucinated generative AI summaries. I am about to click the link anyway.
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.
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 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 Search is illegal, because it breaks the rules established for Search.
But IANAL.
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44734895
Google maps german policy: https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/1699727...
Meanwhile, service in Germany is still rather poor (especially if you have children), but at least no one can complain!
It is relevant for Google though, because they want to transfer it to another product.
And the court is saying that whatever that new product is, Google is not allowed to mislead the public by pretending it is search.
But if Google accurately summarizes the defamatory page, then the summary is defamatory?
It seems that's exactly what they did.
It doesnt even seem to be what the article is saying. This looks like a section 230 sort of issue. Section 230 is a US law that protects platforms like facebook, google etc. being treated as publishers because the information, presumably, is just being passed through. But Germany is saying the AI results are authored by Google.
I am fine with that solution since I don't need to shill for them for some ie investment or employment reasons. Less technically skilled people (aka your parents or grandparents) are getting their lives fucked up left and right because they learned to trust search results, and now they suddenly can't.
Own. Your. Shit.
"Tatbestand
Die Verfügungsklägerinnen begehren von der Verfügungsbeklagten die Unterlassung von Darstellungen KI-generierter Antworten in einer Suchmaschine.
...
Die Verfügungsbeklagte betreibt eine Internet-Suchmaschine unter google.de in Deutschland. Dabei werden nach der Eingabe von Suchbegriffen durch eine die Suchmaschine benutzende Person auf den „Suchbefehl“ hin mithilfe bestimmter Algorithmen nach möglicher Relevanz sortierte Ergebnisse angezeigt. Zusätzlich bietet die Suchmaschine auch als unterstützende Funktion ein Suchergebnisformat an, bei dem mithilfe einer generativen künstlichen Intelligenz (im Folgenden:KI) repräsentative Ergebnisse zusammengefasst und angezeigt werden."
No "Suchmaschine" + no „Suchbefehl“ -> no "Tatbestand"
No "search engine" + no "search command" -> no "elements of a crime"
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.
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 achieve? Is profiteering not punished anymore?
Well, they disclaimed and the user acknowledged
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-QaEB5eXSU Minute 3:00
In fact, in most EU countries "the user acknowledged" works only for a very small subset of stuff, precisely because our lawmakers know that the strong party in a contract would use that to get away from every legal obligation.
Anyone can write a disclaimer, that does not make it enforceable.
And what institution gives out the licenses for journalists and scientists? Is it revokable?
Or selectively. "Vaccines cause autism!" "Okay" "Vaccines don't cause autism!" "Prove it beyond a reasonable doubt or we'll arrest you for lying"
If we can solve these problems, then yes?
You're not even paying for a google service, search is free... You might be the product, and your data, but you didn't directly pay for a service and they didn't sell you a fake service.
I'm not taking Google's side, this isn't about whether it's right or wrong to rob websites of traffic, this is about AI's returning search metadata.
But I'm surprised that they lost this argument, and the line they took in the first place.
The Internet isn't made of fact checked data, it's crowd sourced. How can anyone be liable?
If instead Google gives you an answer right there on google.com, without going to another site, they ARE responsible for it.
That makes sense to me?
None of "AI" companies call their apps "Entertainment fun text generator". They are call them serious names, use words like "intrllegence" and "thinking".
So yeah I'd think if any of "AIs" start to recommend to drink some bleach or take a flight from a 10th floor window these companies should be liable.
I was prepared to say the same thing as you but after reading it seems totally fair.
The key difference is that this would be illegal if a human wrote it too.
This is a gigantic own goal for Google. The average person’s impression is that Google AI is much worse than ChatGPT, even though that’s not actually the case. Google is shoving a terrible model in everyone’s faces.
If you sell food, in a food stall, labeled as food and you add a disclaimer that it is toxic and will make you sick. You are still selling toxic food and you are liable for it.
Google is pretending to give answers to your questions. They offer you a service about answering questions. And then they add a disclaimer "we do not answer questions just write bullshit". That is still fraud and Google should be liable for it.
> isn't this just a soft ban on the deployment of non-deterministic software?
Tetris is non-deterministic and it is not banned like millions of other programs. I do not follow you.
If your software deterministically produces incorrect output for some inputs, you’re liable the same as if it did it non-deterministically.
Honestly I can understand the ruling, but the side effects might be severe.
The law they broke was a law protecting personal and business reputation against false statements of fact. Essentially no one can say I might be wrong, check yourself, but X is Y if that claim is essentially defamatory.
This is pretty good, I hope googles approach is to make sure they don't end up making statements of fact like they did and use more appropriate wording like according to X.... with direct disclaimer that they can't verify it. Even better that they look court documents to find any legal ruling and point people to that too.
But if you as a first party are publishing something directly, like Google is here, you're generally liable for what it says.
Also I am not entirely certain your statement is correct - which false claim does the article make exactly?
It’s super easy to catch on dates and numbers, but it gets other details wrong all the time too. But so many people won’t be double checking the results.
Even those results have a lot to be desired, it is just buried deeper in the insanely verbose research report and impressive looking amount of sources you see move past.
I recently have had a close look at the various "deep research" options the big three (Anthropic, OpenAI and Google) offer. None of them are exactly transparent about how they perform searching other than the "research plan" the present upfront the and shitload of sources they show you (which, to be frank, seems to be clever UX/marketing to make it look extra legitimate and impressive). Which is already a worrying sign to me, as you can't audit the process itself properly. But even with the lack of information available on the front-end I can still see enough that worries me. A few examples:
- "Sources" are taken at face value almost no critical look at the validity of the source, the context it is placed in, etc.
- A lot of sources I know are legitimate are rarely included while a lot of listicles, low effort "reviews", etc do make the cut.
- In multiple instances when looking closer at the research plan and the "hints" they show during searching it becomes painfully clear that often enough they start with an answer in mind based on training data and try to validate that rather than actually researching the data itself.
- Subtly different prompts that by all means should still produce the same factual outcome actually provide wildly different results. This one probably relates to the other points.
In addition to all of this, I also am 100% convinced that AI powered search is incredibly expensive[1], more so than traditional search. In my mind this increased cost eventually will need to be paid by someone, which likely is going to be the user. Since the process is non-transparant I am not confident that the results will not end up being polluted by sponsored deals, etc. There is simply no way in my mind that this is going to end up well for us users.
[1] A while ago I have experimented with creating my own deep research flow with the idea that I might be able to do something with local models. To limit costs I used a SearXNG instance for searching, setup playwright for browsing sources. Using an agentic flow with agents making all the various calls and dispatching other agents ended up eating A LOT of tokens. Even when I did switch to a non agentic flow where each step is orchestrated by code calling on LLMs with simple prompts to validate results still ate a metric ton of tokens for the simplest search query. Mind you, this was not even doing actual deep research but only a few simple search queries. Ironically, google models also did seem to have more trouble coming up with good search queries compared to other models.
"rewire brains for AI dependency" (for money and power reasons obvious to everyone).
In contrast to "secretly implant an agenda about non-AI subject N", which is complicated enough that AI companies are still too out of control to be attempting yet.
Guess that's the end of their AI overviews in the EU!
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 profit? I don't know either but they enabled this for a reason right?
This is the third iteration of the same concept, after AMP and Instant Answers, but somehow with even less of a pushback than with the previous ones.
All three have the ability to perform a web search, then compose a reply based on the search results. Pretty much the exact thing that Google AI Overview does. This ruling may make them liable for false answers.
No, the article implies the court’s logic is that the AI search results are presented as search results and that’s a big part of why they are liable. It seems like the court (again, according to the article) does not find the disclaimers that Google has slapped on the AI results compelling because again, it chose to represent these as a summary of search results and it is aware of the failure rate.
> The court also found that the AI overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results." None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these "the defendant's own statements."
> Google built the AI, Google offered it to users, so Google owns what it produces, "because it alone has influence over the AI's offering and the algorithms with which the AI operates."
Google does not, as a general rule, control the actual content of search results, but usually there’s a distinction between the ranking and presentation of the results vs. the actual content. In this case, the court is basically saying, “You sold this to people as a search summary, you know it might be full of crap and you chose to do it anyway. No, you don’t get to claim the equivalent of a US safe harbor defense.”
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.
A return to the classical understanding of the person, society, and the common good is indispensable.
There's three basic paths for a company hit by this ruling to comply:
1. Stop showing users generated content.
2. Figure out how to generate the content with more quotes and attribution to source websites, to regain the protection offered to search engines.
3. Figure out the hallucination problem, so that every statement in machine generated content is true, or at least defensible.
At this point, there is nothing to gain but volatility. Let the US figure out the economic and social disruption, and then adopt whatever sticks. There is no rush. The useful parts got little moat. It's not like there is a magnitude of difference to justify the expenses and risks of frontier operations, in comparison to open models, or smaller players. Chances are, all of this AI business will settle on local models for most use cases. The US may get their first trillionaire, but let's be real, that's not because of innovation but corruption, exploitation and raging wealth inequality. If the AI economy is not panning out as "projected", there is no recovery. That money got converted to heat and single-use hardware trash. Not worth risking pensions and the social fabric over "the tech edge".
Or what, do you think it's a genuinely good thing that hosting negative reviews is essentially illegal in Germany?
After all, if I can get ChatGPT or Claude to say something false that should count too, right?
The arguments of the ruling should generally apply even when the AI agent makes false statements it wasn't notified about. But in that case the defendant might have a stronger claim about not being able to reasonably ensure the correctness of all statements, and having taken reasonable measures to ensure correctness. Google couldn't really claim any of that after ignoring cease and desist letters about the false claims
Imagine a search for your name resulted in an AI summary saying you are involved with child-trafficking because low capability model linked your first name and perhaps a couple articles on supporting children non-profits to it — and then offering that in a convincing sounding summary right at the top!
If you knew this was all possible and you did it anyways for personal gain then you are additionally negligent which may add aggravation to your charges.
Someone needs to hold the liability at the end of the day. People are experiencing real harm from false claims LLMs are spitting out.
A disclaimer and couched language will probably fly through. And it's going to matter what expectations an user could reasonably have, too.
Is something like,
"People online say that x y and z because a b c"
a credible, correct answer, even if it isn't because of a/b/c?
The instance of this ruling people apparently did not actually say any of the offending claims. 'The court also found that the AI overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results." None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these "the defendant's own statements."'
One way to formulate things that would be less would be "once support a time, in some fabulated world, it's not impossible that some imaginary character would say something following some reason." But then, of course this is not aligning the the deception scheme pushed by companies putting in their interface that the "machine is thinking hard for you".
Because of the same rules, German restaurants also get to pick and choose which reviews stay up. They can literally take down any specific reviews they like.
A restaurant that mostly gets 1 star reviews will still show up with 5 stars on Google maps, as they will simply delete the reviews with less than 5 stars as defamatory.
Here's a couple of examples:
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1peujau/google_rev...
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/18z4shs/legal_thre...
https://www.reddit.com/r/frankfurt/comments/1lox7ha/bad_revi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1iiaco8/restaurant...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskGermany/comments/1ha7sxf/why_do_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1t613w7/it_was_fin...
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1l98608/threatenin...
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1sw34jc/can_you_ge...
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1sw34jc/can_you_ge...
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/10kmn66/writing_an...
tl;dr Germans are particularly bad at coming up with reasonable rules to handle these situations
The US has no strict defamation law and yet your bad review will often still get removed from Amazon or Yelp for no valid reason.
When Google Search is quoting a 3rd-party website that happens to have bad information, that's not on them. Blame shifts to the 3rd-party. This is Google's privilege being a search engine.
When Google operates as an answer machine instead of a search engine, the privelege doesn't apply anymore. There's no 3rd-party to take the blame.
> According to the court, the Al mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn't appear in any of the linked sources.
Implying: if the false claim was found in the sources then it would be protected speech.
There is nothing special about "answer machine" versus "search engine". You are making that part up.
there are no indications it is a scam, but "significant organizational problems and extremely bad customer support lead to (list of bad experiences)".
So my understanding is their unreliable AI summaries are a legal liability for Google in Germany and people can request corrections through the courts.
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.
It's one thing for an LLM to get things wrong. This case is not that though. And if big tech can't make sure that their models don't libel companies and individuals then good riddance. Whatever diminutive economic advantage one can get from "competitive LLMs" probably isn't worth it anyway, especially with all of the other disadvantages of these "competitive LLMs" compounding on our societies and the planet, as the resource usage of the data centres necessary to run and train them exacerbate the ongoing climate crisis.
The solution is simple. Block the EU from accessing any of your services. They can make their own search and social media and digital marketing and AI.
Good luck to them. VPNs will boom.
I can understand the UK struggling with their imperialistic traditions and so on, but you'd think Germans at least would have some humility in trying to project their global ideas and ambitions on the world at this point.
Funny, because I would say this applies much more to AI corporations shoving their product into every facet of society without consent or regard for the harm it's causing.
I also seriously doubt that people are going to be enraged and boycott an entire continent of 400million+ people and start using VPNs because a corporation worth billions got held liable in one specific case in one specific location over the behavior of their hallucination machine - a machine no one asked for and is being shoved down their throats, mind you. If anything, this is gong to have the opposite effect and give people a little relief from the onslaught of BS and lies.
I very much hope we don't see attempts to re-write T&C to avoid this liability.
We really should have triple fines or worse for people who try to push the boundaries of the law.
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.
Tool user is liable in the case of misuse unintended purpose of the tool.
Tool provider is liable when the use of the tool, by design, causes unintended effects despite proper use of the tool.
A simple "AI may make mistakes" line under the box will not help while the box contains false information. The specific information (lines or words) should not be provided if that's a mistake of false.
Another point from the article: they are not just aggregating content, but generating it. If you generate falsehoods, that are not even stated by your sources, of course you're responsible.
This can have significant impact to AI in Germany and the rest of Europe, but it's good to question it and hold people accountable.
Probably not, for the same reason search results aren't an issue.
Even if the answers are correct, they could still be biased, incomplete, misleading, and all the other media-literacy things people should be looking out for.
This ruling seems to go the opposite direction; 'I am legally obliged to give correct answers, so I am always right, trust the AI'.
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.
I first tried it to remind me of what happened in a previous book in a series that I was reading. When I realized it was either misstating plot points or straight up hallucinating, I tried it on a bunch more books to amuse myself.
Older classics are of course more accurate, but for newer or less popular books Gemini won't shy away from giving you a summary culled from misinterpreted Reddit threads and Goodreads reviews. It's like getting a secondhand account from someone who talked to another person who had read the book a long time ago. You get the general gist of it, but with some added flavor.
Even if you upload an entire epub of a book, the results aren't stellar. Rather than a Cliffs Note's quality summary, they're pretty sparse or leave out important bits of information. One chapter summary I got back made a point of describing what one of the characters was wearing, even though it had absolutely zero to do with anything else. Yes, that's technically a "summary", but not quite my tempo.
If Google wants to present summaries of websites in anything more than a very, very superficial description, they're going to have to improve their model's ability to understand context and importance. In theory, a novel is a self-contained bundle of text, so pulling accurate information out of it should be straight forward. A website is naturally going to be way more of a challenge.
All that said, I find the AI summaries from Google/Gemini to be quite useful and a time saver, but I know to always double check something if it's at all important.
So the only thing happening here is they consider Google to be the author of the AI answers and apply a similar sort of anti-defamation law. Perhaps it's a good consequence but the law that allows for this seems to be quite broken.
[0] https://www.settle-in-berlin.com/google-reviews-removal-defa...
Then in order to increase revenue Google dumbed down search very badly and made it very hard to find obscure information. Whoever decided to delete random search terms is someone I want to punch in the face really hard. Call this Google Search 2.0
But the way Google has integrated Gemini Flash into search is actually pretty good and is definitely an improvement over Google Search 2.0
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.
Either:
- Google stole the entirety of the world's copyrighted material and it's using it illegally
- Or, AI learned, in which case what is writing is the AI's own saying, and since it comes from Google, they are liable for it
Every AI model can make something up sometimes. Over millions of daily calls, it's essentially impossible for the technology to be guaranteed correct 100% of the time.
Now if that information is BS and cannot be relied upon, that’s really bad. Leading people on and not delivering? Honestly, Google themselves should have been on it and not the German government. It’s a bad look for them.
Aside: I’ve noticed their AI mode is pretty pathetic for troubleshooting something. 50% of the times the first response is riddled with inaccuracies and mistakes. Repeat prompting is absolutely necessary (so do not expect to one shot anything).
Also I will admit that I still find myself using it because I’m lazy, and it’s easier to talk to AI to get the right answer. Searching organically is hard these days with the volume of content having gone up exponentially.