Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.
The ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google’s AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other sketchy business practices. After smearing publishers by making affirmative statements like “Yes, [it] is known for dubious business practices and is often perceived as a scam,” Google failed to correct the misleading output, even after the publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year.
Google tried the usual arguments to shield itself from liability for false statements in AI Overviews, such as arguing that most users understand that AI outputs aren’t always accurate and must be verified.
So the point of the overview is what then? If you have to research to verify then why give info that most likely is false?
I work with a bunch of non tech yokels. They 100% for sure do not understand that AI answers must be checked and verified.
I can’t wait till all this shit gets pay walled and 95% of people won’t be using it. I don’t really see Google being willing to just eat the losses on ai search queries forever.
Luddite!! Don’t you understand that number go up??
To be fair, Google has lost a lot of business to ChatGPT & friends who are not offering a list of actual content associated with the search at all. Hate Google as much as you want and I’m sure most of it is warranted, but they’re not completely evil in this case
Alphabet’s CEO would run you down with a bus if they thought it would make their stock go up…
Why defend them when they’ve shown nothing but contempt for their customers?
I mean he would pay someone to run you down in a bus. Guy isn’t going near a bus.
“Their turd sandwich has vegetables in it” doesn’t excuse the fact that they took the ham sandwich off the menu entirely.
The court caught that too:
Also, maybe this is just me, but in my experience the pages the Google AI overview links to as sources very often says nothing related to what the AI overview claims, which makes it very difficult to verify the information.
This is the value proposition of llms in general. They are great if you don’t care about quality. They second quality matters their time-saving value drops off to near 0.
they drop into negatives. its hard to find valuable infprmation because ai written articles make it hard to find correct sources.
Yeah, why is that? Why do they say something then cite something as a reference for that statement that sometimes actually states the exact opposite or is unrelated? Is the citation an after thought and not really directly linked to the training materials that generated the statement?
Because they’re just matching words. It has no idea what it’s showing you.
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i saw some sites have disclaimers saying ai outputs are for entertainment purposes only.
in line of goog’s defense: “everybody (most users) knows that”
It could hypothetically help you direct your search by surfacing useful keywords or relevant events or names or something like it. But since they didn’t make it do that, it’s not really reliable for anything but an energy expensive way to remind yourself of things you already know (what was the command for X again)
Speak for yourself, they remind me of things I used to know. I have reached a point where I feel like I have forgotten more than most people know.
I think the idea is that the info is probably true, but has high enough likelihood of being false that you better check anyway, if it’s something that matters. There’s a whole topic in machine learning called “probable approximate correctness” that tries to make that notion precise. Les Valiant’s book of a similar title introduced the concept and looks very good. I have it but haven’t read it yet.
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This isn’t new since ChatGPT and friends dropped. For years before that, Google search results did limited interpretation of natural language requests, not just keyword match frequency. The SEO arms race drove a different kind of AI in search fetching for at least a decade before natural language chatbot tech hit the scene.
I don’t know how much is intentional enshittification to make AI results look better vs how much is simple neglect of the SEO arms race vs maybe it’s genuinely getting harder to deliver good simple search results with LLMs acting as SEO agents?
What I do know is: “AI Mode” delivers more useful information than the old style page link list does these days. The pages linked from the AI Mode results tend to be relevant and useful more than the top page of page links. Hallucinations are way down from where they were 2+ years ago, even better than “top results” misses used to be, IMO. If you’re not getting enough sources in your first AI mode response, ask for more - it delivers.
As was true since the first days of the internet: trust nothing. This is random junk people stick on the web for their own purposes, you have been warned.
How does Google’s AI mode compare to other traditional (non-ai) search engines such as https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ ?
It doesn’t.