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.
Except that this will fuck over small companies. Because if we follow this reasoning, the next step is to debate what is AI and what’s not. And the poor folk lose that battle because of legal fees.
I mean, hey, tell me how an automated summary is not AI. Argue that. Give me a clear legal standard… Easy to hand wave, hard to get right.
Does it use an LLM to generate the summary. Yes or no. This is a binary. It is incredibly easy to define. It’s almost laughable that you think this is a problem.
I have a feeling that the megacorporation’s AI generating false statements about smaller businesses that effectively drives customership away from them harms a lot more small businesses way more than AI-powered businesses being held to account for what their AI states as fact publically.
(And that’s not even counting the harm Google’s AI summaries are already doing to small publishers by driving traffic away from the very websites its using as source material.)
If a company doesn’t want the liability associated with a rogue agent making false statements, then I’ve got news for you - they don’t have to use AI. Literally nobody is forcing small private businesses to use AI for anything.
And what @[email protected] has said is entirely true. Most small companies won’t have an AI, and those that do should still be held accountable for their AI’s public statements.
Unnecessary, in my view. If you use a tool to produce something, and that something breaks a law, then you are liable, not the tool. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a hammer or an AI. If a human employed by Google had written the incorrect summary on Google’s behalf, then Google would still be liable (the difference is that the human writer might also be individually liable, depending on local law).
Search engines received various kinds of legal immunity in many jurisdictions because they were only presenting information written by third parties outside their control. These summaries are not third-party content, and if they are libelous, the responsibility falls squarely on Google.
I fail to understand why it should be bad for small companies.
In my experience most small companies don’t have public AI summaries. And even if they do i still think it’s their obligation to check what they make public.
In the not so distant future just about every site will have AI summarization or QnA as a core part.
Instead of searching through endless documentation you ask AI to trawl and give you the answer. This is undeniably useful. But if they give the wrong answer once and suddenly become liable, that’s a potential risk.
A potential risk that any company implementing an AI for something as simple as a Q&A should be aware of prior to doing that.
If they don’t want the liability, then just don’t use AI for public facing functions. Its not difficult.
How is it “undeniably useful” if it has the potential of giving wrong answers?
Also and perhaps more importantly, are these the lengths people go to avoid reading? If so, we are doomed.
Hopefully not, and this ruling goes some way to ensuring sense prevails. It’s a little different if the LLM providing the “AI” summarization has been trained exclusively on the contents of the site; that ensures that only the work of the site authors is used in generating the summary, which means it’s their words, and also probably less likely to hallucinate.
I deny it. The results of an LLM being used to answer a question are far too often wrong to ever be trusted. Sometimes the errors are obvious, much more often they are subtle and harder to spot, but delivered with certainty none-the-less. This ruling ensures that the ones providing the LLM summary are held liable, in the same way they would be if a human wrote the same summary.
Correct, and that is as it should be. Apply the same logic to a human written piece and you will see that.
In the not so distant future you use your own personal AI to do the trawling and if that thing gets it wrong that’s on you or the company that made it.