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.
We did fine for decades without AI and now just because they desperately need to make a profit from their pointless venture doesn’t mean they can force me to use that garbage.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I know I certainly don’t want anything AI in my search engine. I’ll always switch to whoever provides that. It’s only been around a short time, maybe it’s the way things will be in the future and that’s great and all, but I won’t use it. I know I’m a dinosaur you win
Let us all be dinosaurs
I view them as two different tools entirely.
Did you think encyclopedia britannica was the internet?
Minor clarification - the article writer (not the ruling) said: “In other words, nobody needs AI to search the Internet.”
The actual ruling was that a search provider is responsible if they inaccurately summarize results. When search results are just links to content related to a topic, the provider isn’t responsible for the accuracy of the content, which is created by others. But they are responsible for their own summaries and other provider-created content.
When search results are just links to content related to a topic, the provider isn’t responsible for the accuracy of the content, which is created by others. But they are responsible for their own summaries and other provider-created content.
This is clearly a reasonable line to draw. This is not content created by others. It’s your robot. Fix your shit.
Saying “I slapped a disclaimer on my libelous robot that says that it may generate libel” doesn’t grant you the right to be libelous.
When search results are just links to content related to a topic, the provider isn’t responsible for the accuracy of the content, which is created by others.
Maybe google should try to make a service that just shows links to useful pages to answer the search requests.
Like the Yellow Pages but for the internet!
Don’t be ridiculous. what’s next? Ownership of brought software instead of a License for use?
Which is such an amazing detail, and really is the clincher.
They would have to revert their AI “answers” until they can deliver consistent accuracy on their answers. Which isn’t even a possibility with AI.
I hope someone brings this to the US as well.
This is entirely reasonable and I hope this understanding catches on in courts worldwide.
If I go make my own summary/parody/spinoff/reaction video based on someone else’s content, I’m responsible for the media I created. Simple as that. Same should apply to companies.
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.
The court caught that too:
The court also seemed to take a dig at Google for expecting users not to “blindly trust” AI overviews, noting that the AI tool’s utility “would be significantly diminished if the ‘AI overview’ were generally regarded as unreliable and if every single displayed link required independent verification.”
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.
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)
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.
most likely is false?
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.
“AI Mode” delivers more useful information than the old style page link list does these days.
How does Google’s AI mode compare to other traditional (non-ai) search engines such as https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ ?
It doesn’t.
AI was telling other people’s customers that we owned the other company at some point, so their customers were coming to us for support and telling us that we had to support them
And I’m constantly arguing with idiots who use AI.
Good
A German publisher’s article on the case: https://www.heise.de/en/news/LG-Munich-I-Google-ordered-to-pay-for-false-statements-in-AI-summaries-11327217.html
Because while conventional search results merely present indexed third-party content with title, snippet, and link, the AI function generates a coherent, flowing text that evaluates multiple sources and summarizes them into an independent answer. From the perspective of average users, this appears as direct information from Google, not as a mere forwarding of third-party content.
The previous, rather limited liability of search engines for third-party content is therefore not transferable to this generative format, the chamber ruled. Instead, the usual standards for defamation law apply: untrue factual claims can be prohibited without Google being able to hide behind the automated AI process. The note “created with AI” does not change the attribution to Google.
Give it to me as an option but do NOT make it the primary interface.
Kagi? Add a “?” if you want to invoke summary, otherwise just get search
Works the same on DuckDuckGo for those who don’t have a Kagi subscription!
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.
hopefully this goes through and all of the ai vc sink companies collapse and take their founders with them
I don’t use Google, but in the other search engines I use, I occasionally use the AI thingy. Not for the AI overviews, but because usually, the AI shows better links than the normal search engine does.
Tbh search enginse currently are such a trash that ai sometimes can make things easier. Not saying ai should be the solution because clearing search engine should be but ye
Search engines are trash by design to keep you using the search engine longer. Its entirely their fault, and its not a valid excuse to push AI.
aint saying they should push it. but once again search engines were trashified long before ai was any real thing. but ye i agree, companies won’t even try to repair them cuz 1. keeping them bad is how they make money 2. they can give you a “solution” of some garbage ai
