A German court has ruled that Google is directly liable for what its AI search overviews say. Previous case law shielding search engine operators from liability doesn’t apply to AI overviews.
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Good. Back when they first added the AI overview, a Super Metroid romhack called “Super Metroid But I Hate You” was released and I wanted to watch a speedrunner’s vod of them playing it, so I googled “Super Metroid But I Hate You [speedrunner name]”.
The AI overview replied with a 3 paragraph rant about how I must hate that speedrunner because I am a filthy casual incapable of appreciating skillful gameplay
I am still recovering from the emotional damage and I WILL sue
As you have to. Get in line for the trickle down economy.
I mean how the fuck could it be anyone else’s it’s literally text generation they’re generating the text
Noooooooooo it’s supposed to be an entirely unaccountable computer that did it, you can’t sue the people that own it!
-Google’s lawyers, presumably
They don’t just own it, they made it. How can they argue they’re not liable when they develop and control the slop machine’s codebase?
b-b-b-b-but nobody really knows how it works!!
Presumably they’ll argue that it’s user error for users to take it seriously. Can’t sue the knife company if you cut your own toes off by dropping one, after all.
this is more of a “every time I get anything from the fridge someone from the knife company comes into my kitchen and throws a knife at me” situation
I bought a subscription service for a steak knife and it keeps telling me about white genocide
I mean, nobody should take what it says seriously…
OK. So I can enhance my adblocker to get rid of it from the search results that I take pretty seriously, right?
NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! NOT LIKE THAT! (Bans user’s IP from search engine.)
Capitalist justice systems are broken anyways and AI sucks so I don’t care too much but this ruling could benefit google and other tech giants on the long term. If it means that AI results have to be vetted so thoroughly that only tech giants can do it then it rules out all small competition.
It’d be similar to the ruling that online platforms are liable for all content that other people post on it. Only tech giants have the ability to immediately remove all harmful material and fight court battles if it goes wrong. A small nonprofit platform could be overwhelmed by harmful material and be held liable.
Facebook even lobbies for age restrictions on social media where platforms are responsible for checking every user’s age, because it allows them to harvest even more personal data from its users.
These rules are made to secure the tech giants oligarchy.
How would AI search results be vetted? Even if you had the entirety of the Philippines on your bankroll, you wouldn’t be able to have every AI search result checked. This is not the same as public facebook profiles or youtube videos, which rely heavily on user reports for moderation. This is about procedurally generated search results that only one person sees. I don’t see how AI search overviews survive this.
Just feed the results back into an AI that checks the results!
How would AI search results be vetted?
It’s not about that, fines are part of doing business and large corporations will often leverage certain regulations to capture larger swaths of a market because only they can afford the fines.
If it’s a $5 fine for every reported bad response, Google can just eat that while literally anyone else is suddenly instantly put out of business.
Same with the age verification stuff. They aren’t planning on actually making things safer, just collecting data and paying the fines for not doing the things they’re supposed to do.
It’s not a fine, it’s legal liability for whatever the LLM says. The linked article is about a defamation lawsuit Google lost because the LLM hallucinated sources. If this becomes a precedent case, it could lead to people specifically getting the search overview AI to hallucinate something so they can sue Google for free money.
The main reason I think this could kill AI search overview is because it’s just not a core feature. Google doesn’t need it. Could they afford all the legal fees this would cost them? Probably. But they could also just get rid of it without losing any of their marketshare.
There are many ways to decrease the chance of harmful results. I’m not a tech nerd but clearly the goal here is for google to implement more safety guards and possibly do constant tests for AI results which are both only feasible for Google because it’s a tech giant.
For chatgpt in the beginning there were people employed to continuously read chatgpt responses to peoples questions and to quickly remove it if there was harmful material in it.
If it means that AI results have to be vetted so thoroughly that only tech giants can do it then it rules out all small competition.
Eh. I don’t think so. If they could thoroughly vet the “AI” results, then they wouldn’t need “AI” in the first place.
Time for a grievance lawsuit, I’ve wasted so many hours on bad fixes in modded Skyrim.
On a more serious note. The Google AI is effing dangerous; it’s wrong half the time and some of the “advice” can have lasting consequences.
Oh good! I was concerned, but apparently it’s normal.
Absolutly hilarious. Is it real?
Usually the search/prompt is pretty long/specific nowadays to get these results.
No way to tell, especially now since generative AI has killed the semblance of objective reality.
Half the calls I get are “well the website said this”
oh, did our website say that? Or did the search page say that? Because I have a pretty damn good idea of what our website does and doesn’t say
i hate end-users
If this sticks, it could throw a major monkeywrench into Google’s plan to replace its search engine with pure AI prompting. I suspect every liberal government (very much including Germany) is ultimately going to cave to the capitalists, though.
Could that ruling be bent in a way that makes AI art/voice/music/text owned by Big Tech hence nullifying litigation on that matter?
