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 German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for false claims in its AI-generated search overviews.
Unfortunately, the regional court is the lowest court stage. This will climb up until highest German court and after this to the EU court, I expect to see.
Being then a „Grundsatzurteil“ that is leading all courts in Germany. Our legal system isn’t case driven.
Unfortunately, the regional court is the lowest court stage
No. Landgericht is the second stage already.
It’s Germany, they’ll just find a way to blame Brussels and throw more money at the US as an apology.
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.
And if Google complains that it’s on the pieces of info they got from 3th parties that were wrong and name them, then the 3th parties are able to request compensation for using that info.
Every “AI” company should be (reasonably) liable for what their tools say. How is this even a novel idea?
If a newspaper accidentaly prints false information, they have to publish a correction and might pay a fine. But if they print a front page article about making a pipe bomb, then the editor would probably get sentenced.
This approach would be perfectly fine with LLMs. I understand the nature of the technology, but if they cannot guarantee the quality of the output, then the product is just not ready yet, and we are currently doing unpaid testing.
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I fail to understand why it should be bad for small companies.
In my experience most small companies don’t have public AI summaries. And even if they do i still think it’s their obligation to check what they make public.
In the not so distant future just about every site will have AI summarization or QnA as a core part.
Instead of searching through endless documentation you ask AI to trawl and give you the answer. This is undeniably useful. But if they give the wrong answer once and suddenly become liable, that’s a potential risk.
How is it “undeniably useful” if it has the potential of giving wrong answers?
Also and perhaps more importantly, are these the lengths people go to avoid reading? If so, we are doomed.
Not everyone enjoys reading documentation. We don’t need to be defensive about this. We already have search that can trawl through a well maintained site.
AI can not only go through the documentation but also translate it to layman and point to the sources.
If it gives the wrong answer 1 in every thousand results, it is still undeniably useful. You shouldn’t blindly trust AI is common place knowledge. And it’s no different than doing a Google search for something and some times clicking into a result that is bad. The fact that that possibility exists doesn’t change the fact google is "undeniably " useful.
I’m going to be straightforward with you and say that if someone doesn’t want to read documentation, they shouldn’t be doing the job the documentation is for.
I’ve been bitten by AI summarizing documentation so many times, these days I refuse to use it for that purpose anymore. It’s just not worth it. It creates a loop where it wants to try things that don’t work, walk back, try something else, repeat, and spend $10 worth of tokens in the process.
You say that I shouldn’t blindly trust AI like I shouldn’t blindly trust Google results. The difference is that AI is presented as an authoritative source in itself. Hell, most of the time LLMs don’t link sources unless explicitly asked for. And here’s the thing, if I have to go and read the actual sources, it isn’t doing anything significantly more time efficient than just text search, but it is doing it at ten times the cost.
I’m going to be straightforward with you and say that if someone doesn’t want to read documentation, they shouldn’t be doing the job the documentation is for.
That’s way too black and white. It’s a time and convenience thing. Let’s say i want to troubleshoot something on my motherboard that caused my pc to stop working. I really do not want to be reading through a 300 page manual from my phone (because my pc is not working). Search may turn up 10-20 relevant results that id have to scroll through.
And AI could take my query and do the work for me. Give me the link to the result they think is most relevant as well as explain it in more layman way than the manual.
I’m technical so I could do this without AI. But let’s take a less technical person. Now they can follow along and try as well.
The function is good. Its arguably the best path forward. The issue is accuracy and cost.
But something does not need to be accurate 100% of the time if we are all aware of it. If we wait for something to be 100% perfect nothing would ever progress.
And cost should only concern us on the environmental side. We should absolutely force them to fix that side of it. But price wise? Im really confused why the internet continues to bring up cost. I honestly dont care how much it costs a trillion dollar company to provide a service to us if I dont have to pay. Google, Youtube, Amazon, Netflix, all operated in the red for years and years. I don’t remember public discourse being omg how is Google going to afford to keep giving us nonshitty search.
In the not so distant future just about every site will have AI summarization or QnA as a core part.
Hopefully not, and this ruling goes some way to ensuring sense prevails. It’s a little different if the LLM providing the “AI” summarization has been trained exclusively on the contents of the site; that ensures that only the work of the site authors is used in generating the summary, which means it’s their words, and also probably less likely to hallucinate.
Instead of searching through endless documentation you ask AI to trawl and give you the answer. This is undeniably useful.
I deny it. The results of an LLM being used to answer a question are far too often wrong to ever be trusted. Sometimes the errors are obvious, much more often they are subtle and harder to spot, but delivered with certainty none-the-less. This ruling ensures that the ones providing the LLM summary are held liable, in the same way they would be if a human wrote the same summary.
But if they give the wrong answer once and suddenly become liable, that’s a potential risk.
Correct, and that is as it should be. Apply the same logic to a human written piece and you will see that.
A potential risk that any company implementing an AI for something as simple as a Q&A should be aware of prior to doing that.
If they don’t want the liability, then just don’t use AI for public facing functions. Its not difficult.
In the not so distant future you use your own personal AI to do the trawling and if that thing gets it wrong that’s on you or the company that made it.
It’s very obviously not even the tiniest bit useful and, in fact, is simply a huge liability that could be done safer and cheaper by a person.
I have a feeling that the megacorporation’s AI generating false statements about smaller businesses that effectively drives customership away from them harms a lot more small businesses way more than AI-powered businesses being held to account for what their AI states as fact publically.
(And that’s not even counting the harm Google’s AI summaries are already doing to small publishers by driving traffic away from the very websites its using as source material.)
If a company doesn’t want the liability associated with a rogue agent making false statements, then I’ve got news for you - they don’t have to use AI. Literally nobody is forcing small private businesses to use AI for anything.
And what @MyButSmellsBat@feddit.org has said is entirely true. Most small companies won’t have an AI, and those that do should still be held accountable for their AI’s public statements.
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.
This appears to be impossible with current LLMs. You would need an actual human to verify every possible search result as the LLM is incapable of doing that for itself
appears to be impossible with current LLMs
Not the court’s problem.
“Sorry, your honor, my weapon is that faulty so I can never know who it is who will be killed, but I just had to shoot because that’s how I make my money…”
That’s my point, the problem is the LLM itself shouldn’t even be being used to begin with. I’m not defending AI bullshit by any means. I’m saying “truth” or “quality” are not qualities that an LLM will ever possess by its own nature. The ultimate solution for truth or quality is no LLMs, but I guess that ship has sailed.
Sometimes it does not even matter if it is truth or not.
That may actually be such a case here: Factual statements that can create bad reputation for somebody (or some company).
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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.
Even the number is a bit misleading. First of all, anyone who has ever done LLM benchmarking knows that this isn’t an exact science, at all. You can totally get a 99% on a benchmark and fail every single task on another.
But even this particular claim is nuanced. From the original article:
But with Gemini 3, Google’s A.I.-generated answers were more likely to be ungrounded than when the system was based on Gemini 2, meaning the websites they linked to did not completely support the information they provided. In October, correct answers were ungrounded 37 percent of the time. In February, with Gemini 3, that figure rose to 56 percent.
See https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-overviews-accuracy.html
Meaning that 56% of the time, users cannot even verify the information given by the LLM with the sources the LLM claims it’s using.
Whether 91% accuracy is acceptable depends on how unacceptable the 9% inaccuracy is. If 91% of the information in your term paper is correct you’ll probably get a decent grade, but if you only kill 91% of cancer cells the surviving 9% will grow a treatment-resistant tumor and you’ll probably die. This makes percentages essentially useless - more important is how badly wrong the worst wrong result is.
So whether it’s acceptable depends on whether it’s acceptable. I agree!
This is why we should ban cars outright. Go back to writing on paper. I can stick a pen in my ass and make a cute drawing of a cat. In fact, I might be able to eat a cat and defecate it later, to make it more realistic. And that’s what we need to be; realistic.
(This comment is about AI data centers)
I make this “comment” every once and a while because I called someone out on how their post made little sense by parodying it, and now I just do this.
I’m glad you’re entertaining yourself because I have no idea what you’re prattling about.
I’m drawing attention to my educational (f)art project while simultaneously goading someone who thought a less-hyperbolous but still nonsensical analogy was the greatest tweet anyone’s ever made. I mean, I remember the first time something I did got seen by millions, so I can understand their enthusiasm to defend it, at the same time, we’re still talking about AI data centers, right? I am, at least.
[mimes bong hit]
Bro, that’s assault. I am the bong.
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.
I don’t know where you’re from, but typically within the EU, especially in countries like Germany, Google and other mega corporations from the US don’t have that much sway (yet) within the justice system. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is validated in the near future by more impactful courts.
I think my sniping at Bavaria speaks for itself.
They don’t need sway as much as money and lawyers, which I imagine they have. And this verdict is probably on the worst outcome end of the scale for them. I cannot imagine they will accept a ruling that calls them daft like this one does. They will try to water down liability for their model’s fantasy summaries. Whether they succeed is a different question. But they will try, so they will appeal, so this verdict isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Yet.
All I said is that this verdict isn’t effective yet. These headlines and sadly this article buries this fact in a sentence in the last paragraph. Blink and you miss it stuff. Lemmies tend to overlook this and declare victory over Google when this was merely the first battle of the war.
It will be a “landmark” case, regardless of what the outcome is.
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.
And that’s a problem too. If everything ai says should be fact checked, the burden is shifted back to the consumer making the convenience or ‘productivity’ aspect virtually nonexistent. Such a cop out. Here’s your answer! *be sure to fact check. Okay so google it basically? Why the ai then? Just stupid
Here is an example… Apparently Zelensky was a US president at one point and we all missed it.
That’s actually a really good summary of the issue. It’s the tacitly implied authenticity and “goodness of match” that being the top result implies that shifts the balance.
If they’d put a “generate AI summary of search” button to display the AI result, I the they’d be on firmer ground.
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.
The vast majority of people have less than zero idea of what an AI chatbot is. They’re purposefully marketed to ensure it makes as little sense as possible to anyone who doesn’t do a good bit of research.
People hear or read ‘artificial intelligence’, and picture the batcomputer or C3-P0, which were, for the most part, always 100% correct.
But Google a: calls these summaries, and b: presents them as the top search result.
Also c: gives it a colorful, more pleasant looking window to manipulate users into subconsciously prioritizing it over ‘plain, ugly’ results below.
It still seems like letting people off the hook for media literacy is a knee jerk reaction. Since the dawn of Google, the VAST majority of people who use it have just treated the first result as gospel. I don’t know if scraping that same content and putting it in the same place with the word “Summary” above it is materially that different.
The core problem here is still individuals not taking accountability for their own education. I would actually argue that holding Google to the standard of somehow being “arbiters of truth” is even more dangerous. No one should trust any information presented to them by an entity that has vested financial interests in influencing consumer behavior.
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.
I was thinking the same thing.
An AI output is EITHER an original work (either as a wholly original work or as a derivative of another work), or it’s not (and is thus a republication of an existing work).
If it’s a republication, then Google owes a ton of copyright fees and the original publisher of whatever bit of training data got regurgitated is liable. If it’s an original / derivative work, then Google owes nobody anything, but is responsible for whatever the AI outputs.
For example if I write somewhere ‘It’s 100% safe to mix ammonia and chlorine, it gets stains out super fast!’ (note- DON’T do this, it’s toxic), I’m the author of that statement so if someone does that and dies I’ve got partial responsibility for that death.
Same thing with Google.
For example if I write somewhere ‘It’s 100% safe to mix ammonia and chlorine, it gets stains out super fast!’ (note- DON’T do this, it’s toxic), I’m the author of that statement so if someone does that and dies I’ve got partial responsibility for that death.
Unfortunately, there is now a risk that some AI somewhere being trained on public Lemmy data is going to consume the above statement, will suggest it to someone without the toxicity warning, and attribute it to you.
Sadly this is happening.
Example one- Q: How many USB ports does my computer have? A: kill yourself.
Example two- Q: how should I deal with depression? A: jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Example three- Q: Should I run with scissors? A: Yup!
Let’s not forget a healthy diet includes eating rocks.
Or that you should drink urine to pass kidney stones.
Hey, your examples are missing /u/fucksmith’s pizza recipe from reddit.
Fun fact: Methyl cellulose is actually used as a form of glue, but is also used in food. It’s derived from cellulose. This also happens to be the stuff those anti-vegan fanatics are referring to, when they claim that vegan alternatives have “wallpaper paste” in them (while ignoring that it’s also used in some meat products and ice cream).
I thought wallpaper glue was made of cornstarch…
There are probably plenty of different products with different recipes out there. Might also depend on what’s readily available in the region.
Ah that’s awesome!!! I’d seen that output before but never saw the story of its input.
But your honor I really wanna
If you add in “and here’s your check, sir” at the end this method actually works in the USA.
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.
I don’t use Google, but DuckDuckGo Search Assist often shows summaries with links that don’t at all support what the summary says, but I often still forget to fact check it. I might start using the no AI version of the site because I’m concerned I might accidentally register something important as factual at some point that isn’t.
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.
What needs to happen is:
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an enforceable certification process, like part of FMVSS, to state “this vehicle is certified as L[0-5] self driving per https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-05/Level-of-Automation-052522-tag.pdf”. Put the certification on the window sticker. Have it reported to insurance.
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Levels 0-2 cannot be advertised as self driving, even though there may be hands-free driving capability in some limited cases. The driver remains fully responsible and liable (no change to current liability rules essentially)
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Levels 3 and 4 will be required to have shared liability with the driver and manufacturer in all conditions where the vehicle is in control of itself. This includes roads that the vehicle should be able to navigate autonomously and the driver has requested it to, but it is not for any reason.
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Level 5 would place liability on the manufacturer solely, as there is no indicated driver in this case. This is the only one that can be advertised as “self-driving”.
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Would work IF you add the proviso that levels 3-4 cannot be advertised or implied to operate on their own initiative.
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Interesting showstopper for the AI-Bubble. Let’s see where this is going.
“This slop is not available in your country.”
VPN getting set to Germany if that happens.
Awesome news
Hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahaa! YES!
Based.
