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.
The article says google will be fighting this, but I don’t think they have a leg to stand by. Unless they want to be liable they will need to sanitize the data. But then we are just back to regular old search results.
Yeah, they have to fight it tooth and nail, because it threatens how they want to do business on a conceptual level. But I also cannot see how they would argue this case.
If another webpage said those publishers are a right cunt (written by AI), that would be defamation for sure. So far, Google was allowed to say those publishers are a right cunt, because they were quoting another webpage.
If they’re not doing that anymore, if they’re not even paraphrasing what another webpage said, but just making own claims, then that’s their own responsibility.
In theory, I could imagine a ruling that says that paraphrasing doesn’t have to be accurate at all times, but in practice, this would be absolute bedlam. Any webpage could publish the wildest misinformation and just say that, oops, they were paraphrasing.
So, even if they can get such ruling through, there would need to be law changes sooner or later, which explicitly make it illegal again.
So ads basically? You mean ads?
We don’t need AI search, we need agnostic search. We need a search that isn’t biased and doesn’t rely on SEO money. With Google failing miserably at search and flailing with Ai BS, the field is ripe. There are some competitors but i think there’s a lot of room for an even better option here.