A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previous limited liability protections for search engine operators don't apply to AI overviews. In this case, Google's AI had falsely linked two publishers to fraud and made claims that didn't appear in any of the linked sources. The ruling could set a precedent for AI-generated content liability worldwide.
  • Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
    1·
    13 days ago

    A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate “independent, new, and substantive statements” by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites. And only Google can check those statements, the court said, “at least by comparing the underlying third-party websites with its own statements based on them.”

    Honestly this is all the reasoning you need to infer that Google should be liable. Google alone has editorial control over the summary their AI generates, not the outside sources used to generate these statements, ergo Google should be held liable for that.

    At the hearing, Google argued that users could check the linked sources themselves to verify whether the AI summary was correct. Users generally knew “that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted,” the company claimed.

    … And you know that’s true when the best Google could muster as a defence is to say that people shouldn’t be blindly trusting the AI, which ironically means even Google thinks their AI is full of shit.

    But unfortunately for Google, not only does the court not buy that defence, but it would appear that’s contrary to how most people use the feature.

    The ruling may also have international reach, according to the court.

    I seriously hope so. Its about time companies started taking proper liability for the actions of their LLMs.