German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

benoau

> In this case, Google's AI had wrongly linked two publishers to scams and shady business practices. Guess that's the end of their AI overviews in the EU!

maxdo

Their digital sovereignty

tristanj

Anyone know if this ruling applies to answers generated by AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude? 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.

keyle

I'm surprised this is even a thing. After all, you go to Google not for the truth, but to search Google. Since when is truthiness the "guarantee of service"? 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?

Swizec

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.

Heirlomb

Some digital matters concern the state and others are private and there should be no sovereignty of the state over private matters.

weird-eye-issue

I have a business where our support email is recommended when people are searching for how to cancel a completely unrelated scam subscription that is showing up on their bank or credit card charges. We get emails almost daily from confused people.

cmiles8

Companies generally are liable if their product doesn’t perform. No reason AI should be any different.

tjpnz

Does this extend to ads displayed in search results? Because they absolutely should be liable for the scams they advertise also.

cm2187

Doesn't libel require to be deliberate? Ie you can't sue for libel if the author admits a mistake and corrects it?

russellbeattie

I've found a fun and pretty reliable way to get Gemini to output incorrect information: Ask for a chapter by chapter summary of a book. 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.

kevinxsun

Google generated those content, so Google should be liable to its own product, that's different from the third party links they just simply gathered and displayed, totally different things. If you are a victim too, reply below.

kevinxsun

Google generated those content, so Google should be liable to its own product, that's different from the third party links they just simply gathered and displayed, totally different things. I wonder how many victims are there now.

wyager

EU countries continuing to ensure the conditions for their future economic competitivity

why_at

I agree with the ruling, but this makes me wonder if it will be possible to have any AI agent at all if it's consistently applied. After all, if I can get ChatGPT or Claude to say something false that should count too, right?

missedthecue

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?

dyauspitr

So stupid. What is this with making perfect the enemy of good. You can never guarantee the output of an LLM does that mean Germany does get to use them?

jjcm

What constitutes a correct answer though? 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?

Frieren

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 achieve? Is profiteering not punished anymore?

ggm

Good. This should be taken as the precedent for all economies: If you promulgate demonstrably false information to somebody's detriment then the owner and operator of the machine has to carry the liability. I very much hope we don't see attempts to re-write T&C to avoid this liability.