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.
  • notabot@piefed.socialEnglish
    11·
    2 hours ago

    In the not so distant future just about every site will have AI summarization or QnA as a core part.

    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.

    Instead of searching through endless documentation you ask AI to trawl and give you the answer. This is undeniably useful.

    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.

    But if they give the wrong answer once and suddenly become liable, that’s a potential risk.

    Correct, and that is as it should be. Apply the same logic to a human written piece and you will see that.