Technology

I literally laughed out loud reading the headline. Good shit, hopefully the Find Out season will carry on at this kinda pace. Probably won't, but it'd be nice to see.

A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate "independent, new, and substantive statements" by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites. And only Google can check those statements, the court said, "at least by comparing the underlying third-party websites with its own statements based on them."

Honestly this is all the reasoning you need to infer that Google should be liable. Google alone has editorial control over the summary their AI generates, not the outside sources used to generate these statements, ergo Google should be held liable for that.

At the hearing, Google argued that users could check the linked sources themselves to verify whether the AI summary was correct. Users generally knew "that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted," the company claimed.

... And you know that's true when the best Google could muster as a defence is to say that people shouldn't be blindly trusting the AI, which ironically means even Google thinks their AI is full of shit.

But unfortunately for Google, not only does the court not buy that defence, but it would appear that's contrary to how most people use the feature.

The ruling may also have international reach, according to the court.

I seriously hope so. Its about time companies started taking proper liability for the actions of their LLMs.

All the arguments of "AI doesn't impact copyright because it creates derivative content" were bound to lead here. You can't (or at least shouldn't be able to) have it both ways.

Can we apply the same logic and principle to self driving cars now please and hold the owners of the proprietary software fully and properly responsible for every poor judgement, traffic violation, accident injury and death that happens in self drive mode.

the AI makes its own claims that don't appear in any linked source, and the operator has to answer for them. [...] if it gains traction internationally, the fallout could hit not just Google but every AI provider

And that is a good thing!

We (the world) need at least some basic level of quality and truth in AI generated answers. FINALLY.

Excellent. Make platforms with algorithmic feeds count as publishers, too, and you can solve 90% of the world’s problems

"This slop is not available in your country."

This is more important that just AI overviews and establishes that companies are responsible for the editorializing they do. That's much more important in algorithmic suggestions, which drive people into doing things they never would have done otherwise (see: Trump voters).

I hope this stands through all instances and is applied generously, because so many people have been fucked up beyond recognition by following the trail of the algorithm, especially on social and video sites.

Removing all the emotion from this, the specific problem with these AI overviews is how Google presents them to you.

Everybody with some sense knows AI's can excrete total hogwash and it's answers need to be fact checked down to the most minute detail. Some people take what they get from AI's as gospel anyway, but that is a them problem.

But Google a: calls these summaries, and b: presents them as the top search result. Both of these things come with a greater than normal degree of implied factuality.

Someone techincally minded will know it's still AI an subject to the same scrutiny but the population at large simply does not, because they entered a search query in a google search box and aren't willingly and deliberately talking to an AI.

This isn't final. Google has time to appeal. Let's hold off on the label "landmark" until it reaches legal effectiveness. Which it probably won't, however good a verdict by a German regional court, much less one based in Bavaria, this is in my opinion.

Google lawyers arguing in court that Google's so-called AI results are shit anyways and people should know it is chef's kiss.

91% accuracy is the kind of thing that may sound good… hey! It’s an A minus! But it’s actually completely, totally unacceptable. Imagine if the turn signal wand on your car operated with 91% accuracy. About one in every ten times it would light up the wrong direction. How many accidents are we causing? A lot.

While this is a solid ruling and establishes great precedent, it's in Germany and so likely will only eventually apply to the EU. It would be cool to see a similar decision from a US court.

Hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahaa! YES!

Based.

Oh woe, we just wanted to give y'all some cool and useful feature!

Just think of it, why would a greedy corporation want to give you a computation-heavy feature for free, for all your everyday searching purposes? One that would be easy to withdraw instead of fighting in courts over it.

Especially if that corporation has full control over specific results served to you on your query

They'll make them click on a liability agreement every time they try to use it.

Yes! They are responsible. They're not quoting, they are hallucinating crap they think someone else wrote somewhere.

I mean yeah? This is the only way to square the circle. Same as if you buy a thing from amazon, it does not matter what they try to pull in the back you went and bought a thing from a place. If you google a thing and google shows a wrong (and often plain dangerous) answer then yeah, that counts as google! Maybe if they did not also try and fake the result being true they could have an argument.

And there is already precedence for this as a few nation's courts have found that a company is bound by promises made by their own AI agents that it empowers to answer customers. This is just the same idea but for search. I hope it goes though all the German courts and is picked up in other places.