Anyone know if this ruling applies to answers generated by AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude?
All three have the ability to perform a web search, then compose a reply based on the search results. Pretty much the exact thing that Google AI Overview does. This ruling may make them liable for false answers.
Pretty sure this ruling will be used as a precedent in cases against the other providers really soon. As I understand it, there is a legal cottage industry that brings digital related cases (eg. Copyright) in Germany.
I'm surprised this is even a thing. After all, you go to Google not for the truth, but to search Google. Since when is truthiness the "guarantee of service"?
You're not even paying for a google service, search is free... You might be the product, and your data, but you didn't directly pay for a service and they didn't sell you a fake service.
I'm not taking Google's side, this isn't about whether it's right or wrong to rob websites of traffic, this is about AI's returning search metadata.
But I'm surprised that they lost this argument, and the line they took in the first place.
The Internet isn't made of fact checked data, it's crowd sourced. How can anyone be liable?
That is exactly the point of the ruling, though... they are saying that AI summaries are NOT the same as search. If Google was just returning search results, and then users clicked on a website and read the content there, Google is not responsible for the content.
If instead Google gives you an answer right there on google.com, without going to another site, they ARE responsible for it.
I think it's very clear that Google's AI overviews go far beyond just searching Google because they often incorrectly compile sources to come up with an incorrect answer. For example of this look at the comment I made in this thread
Google itself is more trustworthy from a normal person perspective as they use it a lot.
None of "AI" companies call their apps "Entertainment fun text generator". They are call them serious names, use words like "intrllegence" and "thinking".
So yeah I'd think if any of "AIs" start to recommend to drink some bleach or take a flight from a 10th floor window these companies should be liable.
That's the difference between returning search results and interpreting the information and summarising them. If a newspaper says 'so-and-so has been arrested for theft' it's not the same as them summarising to 'so-and-so is a thief', the second is potentially libel. Why should Google be held to a different standard?
I go to Google to search, but get spammed as if I wanted to talk to a chatbot (and a very poor quality chatbot at that).
This is a gigantic own goal for Google. The average person’s impression is that Google AI is much worse than ChatGPT, even though that’s not actually the case. Google is shoving a terrible model in everyone’s faces.
The question is whether Google is publishing false claims or relaying other people’s false claims. The court found it to be the former which makes sense to me.
Good. The true mark of AGI is when a company accepts liability and doesn’t bury “for entertainment purposes only” deep in their TOS. Same as it works with employees.
Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger.
But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.
I have a business where our support email is recommended when people are searching for how to cancel a completely unrelated scam subscription that is showing up on their bank or credit card charges. We get emails almost daily from confused people.
I've found a fun and pretty reliable way to get Gemini to output incorrect information: Ask for a chapter by chapter summary of a book.
I first tried it to remind me of what happened in a previous book in a series that I was reading. When I realized it was either misstating plot points or straight up hallucinating, I tried it on a bunch more books to amuse myself.
Older classics are of course more accurate, but for newer or less popular books Gemini won't shy away from giving you a summary culled from misinterpreted Reddit threads and Goodreads reviews. It's like getting a secondhand account from someone who talked to another person who had read the book a long time ago. You get the general gist of it, but with some added flavor.
Even if you upload an entire epub of a book, the results aren't stellar. Rather than a Cliffs Note's quality summary, they're pretty sparse or leave out important bits of information. One chapter summary I got back made a point of describing what one of the characters was wearing, even though it had absolutely zero to do with anything else. Yes, that's technically a "summary", but not quite my tempo.
If Google wants to present summaries of websites in anything more than a very, very superficial description, they're going to have to improve their model's ability to understand context and importance. In theory, a novel is a self-contained bundle of text, so pulling accurate information out of it should be straight forward. A website is naturally going to be way more of a challenge.
All that said, I find the AI summaries from Google/Gemini to be quite useful and a time saver, but I know to always double check something if it's at all important.
Google generated those content, so Google should be liable to its own product, that's different from the third party links they just simply gathered and displayed, totally different things. If you are a victim too, reply below.
Google generated those content, so Google should be liable to its own product, that's different from the third party links they just simply gathered and displayed, totally different things. I wonder how many victims are there now.
If companies can be held liable (in spite of very visible disclaimers, ToS, and usage policies) for the output of non-deterministic software, isn't this just a soft ban on the deployment of non-deterministic software?
So stupid. What is this with making perfect the enemy of good. You can never guarantee the output of an LLM does that mean Germany does get to use them?
How could anything else make any sense? Platforms are getting used to provide dangerous broken products and get away with it. There should be some limit to it.
When I was a kid it was possible to buy any foraging books from a store and they had a minimum quality. Is that so difficult to achieve? Is profiteering not punished anymore?
Good. This should be taken as the precedent for all economies: If you promulgate demonstrably false information to somebody's detriment then the owner and operator of the machine has to carry the liability.
I very much hope we don't see attempts to re-write T&C to avoid this liability.
Choosing the answer for you rather than leaving it to the user is a tremendous power and the court correctly diagnoses it comes with responsibly to minimize harm to others in society.
Oh, I just found out that my Google search doesn't show AI summary anymore! I tried many search queries which typically will show an AI summary, but it only flicked on briefly then disappear entirely. Obviously, Google has reacted quickly on this ruling!
We should be teaching people to be cynical of AI answers.
Even if the answers are correct, they could still be biased, incomplete, misleading, and all the other media-literacy things people should be looking out for.
This ruling seems to go the opposite direction; 'I am legally obliged to give correct answers, so I am always right, trust the AI'.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 53.1 ms ] threadGuess that's the end of their AI overviews in the EU!
All three have the ability to perform a web search, then compose a reply based on the search results. Pretty much the exact thing that Google AI Overview does. This ruling may make them liable for false answers.
You're not even paying for a google service, search is free... You might be the product, and your data, but you didn't directly pay for a service and they didn't sell you a fake service.
I'm not taking Google's side, this isn't about whether it's right or wrong to rob websites of traffic, this is about AI's returning search metadata.
But I'm surprised that they lost this argument, and the line they took in the first place.
The Internet isn't made of fact checked data, it's crowd sourced. How can anyone be liable?
If instead Google gives you an answer right there on google.com, without going to another site, they ARE responsible for it.
That makes sense to me?
None of "AI" companies call their apps "Entertainment fun text generator". They are call them serious names, use words like "intrllegence" and "thinking".
So yeah I'd think if any of "AIs" start to recommend to drink some bleach or take a flight from a 10th floor window these companies should be liable.
I was prepared to say the same thing as you but after reading it seems totally fair.
The key difference is that this would be illegal if a human wrote it too.
This is a gigantic own goal for Google. The average person’s impression is that Google AI is much worse than ChatGPT, even though that’s not actually the case. Google is shoving a terrible model in everyone’s faces.
Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger.
But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.
I first tried it to remind me of what happened in a previous book in a series that I was reading. When I realized it was either misstating plot points or straight up hallucinating, I tried it on a bunch more books to amuse myself.
Older classics are of course more accurate, but for newer or less popular books Gemini won't shy away from giving you a summary culled from misinterpreted Reddit threads and Goodreads reviews. It's like getting a secondhand account from someone who talked to another person who had read the book a long time ago. You get the general gist of it, but with some added flavor.
Even if you upload an entire epub of a book, the results aren't stellar. Rather than a Cliffs Note's quality summary, they're pretty sparse or leave out important bits of information. One chapter summary I got back made a point of describing what one of the characters was wearing, even though it had absolutely zero to do with anything else. Yes, that's technically a "summary", but not quite my tempo.
If Google wants to present summaries of websites in anything more than a very, very superficial description, they're going to have to improve their model's ability to understand context and importance. In theory, a novel is a self-contained bundle of text, so pulling accurate information out of it should be straight forward. A website is naturally going to be way more of a challenge.
All that said, I find the AI summaries from Google/Gemini to be quite useful and a time saver, but I know to always double check something if it's at all important.
After all, if I can get ChatGPT or Claude to say something false that should count too, right?
Is something like,
"People online say that x y and z because a b c"
a credible, correct answer, even if it isn't because of a/b/c?
Next do Amazon that is selling AI generated foraging books: - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-...
When I was a kid it was possible to buy any foraging books from a store and they had a minimum quality. Is that so difficult to achieve? Is profiteering not punished anymore?
I very much hope we don't see attempts to re-write T&C to avoid this liability.
Even if the answers are correct, they could still be biased, incomplete, misleading, and all the other media-literacy things people should be looking out for.
This ruling seems to go the opposite direction; 'I am legally obliged to give correct answers, so I am always right, trust the AI'.