down vote all you want, but I firmly believe this is an example where the user needs to use some judgement on the information they receive and have some critical thinking skills. google would be right to remove all AI results from germany.
Now, search engines are usually afforded some amount of protection against defamation claims — they’re not held liable for simply indexing and quoting third party defamatory claims. Which is to say: Google wouldn’t be liable for claiming you’re a poopoo head if this comment shows up in search results.
The point of this ruling is that AI-generated text isn’t a quote from a third party, it’s text generated by Google’s own tools, so it’s speech by Google itself. It might be wrong, sure, but it’s still presented as a statement of fact.
At trial they can have the whole debate about whether Google was negligent in how they build their systems, and all that jazz, but let’s be clear here — it’s not a matter of every little factual mistake getting Google sued (and that would be absolutely terrifying from a freedom of speech perspective), but rather that the technical means by which you generate content doesn’t change your liability in publishing that content.
Put differently: it’s not newspaper readers complaining the paper is inaccurate, it’s the people mentioned in the articles.
It is not just some people, it is a lot of people insode the tech itself pushing the "trustworthy" claim.
consider Purdue pharma - the Sacklers got off with all their wealth intact because they were too big to sue and properly collect money for their victims.
They're also almost universally regarded as having committed evil acts at this point, so who cares why they got away with it?
The problem for LLMs is that they do not learn, and can't be prevented to produce that libel ever again. If Google finds a way to make that happen, no court would stop them from offering an LLM.
how?
errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.
google would be right to remove all AI results from germany
i'd consider that a win.
If it’s important, check it. If it’s not important, then it is pretty much just entertainment.
LLMs can be very useful in a general web search and save some time, but if you don’t put those literacy & critical thinking skills to the test and actually confirm anything, then you might as well not even have bothered with the search at all unless you’re hoping it can just replace all of your original thinking too.
Or you don’t care about those things at all, and you will buy the T-Shirt that’s in front of you right now rather than wait later and buy one that better reflects your supposed values when you’ve done an appropriate amount of research. Using AI may even reduce the amount of time you spend on that part.
Your T-Shirt buying patterns & values are not my concern though.
Businesses might (well, will) suffer because people are misusing AI, but it is a misuse to do anything with it without an additional verification step.
To be clear here, I have no issue with Google taking it on the chin in cases like this, but what the comment I was originally responding to had this:
> errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.
And my point is this: if it matters, verification is not optional. If it doesn’t matter, then fine, skip the verification step, but if you’re taking whatever text is generated by a GPT at face value without understanding what that is or being able to determine the source inputs for the “claims” it outputs, then you’re part of the problem because sometimes the source is just a GPT-generated web page, and that’s obviously not trustworthy. Sometimes it’s a MediaWiki site page that doesn’t actually exist, but because it’s MediaWiki it’s not going to return a 404. Using a tool requires understanding it including its failure modes, and in the case of LLMs that means: trust nothing, verify everything.
Obviously the marketing point of the AI tools is it just gives you an answer straight up so you don't have to bother reading normal sources.
> Obviously the marketing point of the AI tools is it just gives you an answer straight up so you don't have to bother reading normal sources.
To lazy people yes. That would be a marketing point. It’s not that though, so you use it to save time, but you don’t get to skip the verification step.
A journalist could not make up a harmful statement about someone and get away by saying the readers should have all read the sources. AI companies want to take all the benefits and profits, while holding none of the liability and responsibility for the harms they are causing.
Journalists do that all the time. We even have a whole collection of words to describe it. Muckraking for instance is probably about 100 years old. Its even in the Google auto-complete in the browser I am posting from.
LLMs are, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of outsourced workers.
Google created a summary, not just sharing search results.
Google is responsible for the output it created and then published.
If they had only surfaced search results, then they would not be liable for what other people generated.
Google’s scale does not protect it from this liability.
> errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.
Because if someone goes through the citations and it doesn’t substantiate what was generated, then what was generated was obviously bollocks. Being able to recognize those contradictions is an essential skill to using LLMs with web search at all. It’s not rocket science.
it's like saying people should not use a computer if they don't know how to keep it secure.
you have to look at the reality, which is that people are not educated or critical enough to use AI safely. and that misinformation can cause people to get killed.
just yesterday there was a post about a man being falsely accused of a crime by AI tools and losing his job and his family as a consequence.
these mistakes destroy lives, and most people are far to trusting to use AI tools safely
My eyes are brown.
I dislike coffee.
My phone is on the desk next to me right now.
One of these is false, and the other two are true. Can you recognise which is which? Or do you not have this "essential skill"?
When you're being given information about a topic you don't already know about, there's no skill to be able to recognise which pieces of that information are correct and which aren't. Either you know the information already, or you don't.
Either way, we do not want a repeat of that.
Plus too big to fail as a US malaise, that then toppled the rest of the economy.
The EU is taking steps to prevent that, so this is laudable.
If a Google employee (like a support agent) says a mistruth, the company is liable and you can sue. They can’t just say “hihi oopsies our support agents are useless”
It's entirely possible for legislatures to attach clauses to restrictions that make them only apply to businesses above 50 employees, or above $1M ARR, or whatever.
(Sarcasm to support your argument)
I, too, agree that google is too large and should be broken up into multiple smaller companies.
But until then, be a good citizen?
What? That's fucking feudalism... Peasants and Lords.
If you're lucky enough, you're born as a Lord. (And maybe don't live during a revolution)
This makes no sense to me at all. If you're small you should get less bureaucracy than if you're bigger.
For e.g. self driving cars there should not be any exemptions. There are people's lives at stake, people who didn't sign up for your shitty service.
As others already said, that would be a great outcome, and german citizens would benefit.
It is a search engine. It used to have decent excerpts. It doesn't need hallucinated generative AI summaries. I am about to click the link anyway.
So Google could, for example, switch from a tiny "this could be wrong!" byline to having the AI be less overconfident every freaking time regardless of whether it's spouting made up crap or actual facts.
The scale doesn't sound like a way out. If your company expects to get away with doing the wrong thing where smaller companies can't, then the solution isn't to continue getting away with it.
As a society we decide. Are we embracing all users, are there basic rights and assunptions? Do we only enable some?
As a free (as in cost to end user) system, Germany is arguing that their social compact raises the mininum bar. Frankly, thus might help drive a rush to increased accuracy for AI- tech finds a way. Equally it may hinder - beaurocracy creates barriers.
I'd love to be able to rely on these search results. I see them ad the same prior set of inaccuracies whereby I have to do more research. At least now there's a summary and direct links to the supporting information. But equally, we're primed with the information in the summary.
It doesn't help that there have been active efforts for decades to prevent people from learning and developing critical thinking skills.
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. - The 2012 Texas Republican Party Platform (saying the quiet part out loud)
This very much depends on where you live between state (US), and countries. Where I live, it's the complete reverse, critical thinking is baked into the population, into learning, into nigh everything. Our challenge is the complete lack of privacy, sadly.