Overregulation, at best, is a good way to guarantee that your country won't have access to interesting and useful features and technologies. At worst, it's a good way to guarantee that the twenty-first century will belong to the US, if not to China.
I can make mistakes. It's on you to fact-check my claims.
Do you think these are harmless statements? Does the disclaimer suffice? If I was Google's AI Overview, do you think 100% of people will check those sources?
There is nuance here, and it's not going away because AI and innovation.
Yes, I do. An assertion made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, whether it comes from Google or from you.
If you demand perfection, you will receive nothing. Why is that so hard for people to understand? The world simply cannot work the way you say it should.
A Danish newspaper at one point falsely claimed that a named person had raped a child, with no evidence. The only way that person escaped public judgement was by going into full attack mode and publicly suing and attacking the newspaper and the reporter. You have to be an incredibly strong and resourceful person to do that and not just go into hiding. Also one thing is suing a Danish newspaper, imagine the legal team, the resources, you face if you're trying to take Google to court for defamation.
Also in a similar vein Apple pulled a feature real fast last year when it was doing something similar to BBC news summaries -
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/01/06/bbc-calls-out-apple-ai-...
It can destroy you. You are analyzing this on the assumption that people are rational and have capacity to do the check. They have neither.
Anyone who does accept Google's AI output blindly will soon find that their mistaken opinion of CamperBob2 is the least of their problems. There is a reason Google goes (well) out of their way to warn people that the results may be wrong. That should be sufficient warning for reasonable people of good faith.
You have no idea what it can mean to end up in such a situation.
No one with a straight face would compare an AI overview saying someone is an asshole to the New York Times running a story saying someone is an asshole.
In the world according to you, AI couldn't exist. Or more likely, it would be accessible only to academic and corporate/financial/government/military elites. That's not OK, and I'm unwilling to join you in pretending that it is.
Correct? Or am I misinterpreting your post?
If you don't understand your software well enough to prevent and/or fix such outcomes, you are in moral default by making it available to people.
I find it analogous to selling people hard drugs.
Some users will be fine.
That does nothing for the ones it utterly destroys.
No one is, until someone is. You could say the same about newspapers, TV, or the internet.
> If they do, that's not Google's problem.
Well yes, it is, at least in Germany for now, where at least one judge seems to see it that way. And that's correct, IMHO, because Google would (in that case) make something appear as factual information when it is not.
> It's someone else's fault, principally those who blindly acted on information they were told was potentially incorrect.
Those people are definitely at fault; history is full of examples of mobs acting horribly based on shallow, incomplete, misleading, flawed, or flat out wrong information. But you can't just put all blame on those mobs, when someone gave them this information - or do you think, for example, Donald Trump played no part in the January 6 riots and should not be held accountable for it?
> In the world according to you, AI couldn't exist. Or more likely, it would be accessible only to academic and corporate/financial/government/military elites. That's not OK, and I'm unwilling to join you in pretending that it is.
That isn't my stance at all. AI should exist, and it should be widely available in my opinion. I don't even think this is primarily about AI, but entities in a position of power acting responsibly, such as Google (which has worked hard to position itself as a gateway to information and steward of facts.)
I think we should not put the burden of verifying information entirely on consumers, we shouldn't allow big corporations to run the largest social experiment in history on their own terms, and we need to talk about responsibility and safety.
> So your position is that the general public should be given access to AI only when it is either capable of flawless accuracy, or when the AI provider is prepared to assume unbounded liability despite warning the user that perfect accuracy is not possible.
That is neither my, nor the sibling's, nor this ruling's position. The issue the court took was that Google presented AI-generated information in a shape that was indistinguishable to common users from the previously statistically sourced factoids in Google Search - a product that historically allowed to search the internet for things and get back search results, not AI-provided guesses and hopefully-correct information.
The entire point is that companies should not be allowed to use AI recklessly. This point is also one that the Pope made in his encyclical, and the EU posits in the AI act, by the way.
I'm missing the comparison here. Trump (in)famously did not post any disclaimers. He did not leave any room for doubt when he accused the Democrats of stealing the election. He spread feces and called it fact, so yes, he should certainly have been held accountable for the consequences. His voters, however, decided not to do so, and that was the end of it.
The issue the court took was that Google presented AI-generated information in a shape that was indistinguishable to common users from the previously statistically sourced factoids in Google Search - a product that historically allowed to search the internet for things and get back search results, not AI-provided guesses and hopefully-correct information.
Did they, or did they not, include a highly-visible disclaimer that the results might be incorrect?
I'm hammering on this, not just because I think it's what should have determined the outcome of the case, but also because the last few times I've seen Google AI summaries, they did not include such a disclaimer. Gemini itself still does, but the instant results on the search page don't appear to. Which is obviously not OK.
If they have stopped warning users, or if they didn't warn the users in the situation leading up to the lawsuit, then that more-or-less instantly flips me over to your side. We wouldn't actually have anything to argue about in that case.
It is obvious that the defamed companies are the ones having a problem, not the ignorant viewers.
Why should those companies not hold Google liable for that outcome?
Well, good luck with your... um... innovative HR strategy.
The point is, if you take Google AI summaries seriously, that's a "you" problem, not a "me" problem. I have a rather generic name, so it's safe to say it shows up in some pretty foul contexts. Life goes on.