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Comment by chias | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like a win win to me

To remove the choice from responsible people who can understand that LLM answers are not to be trusted with anything important?

If our standard for laws would be that "well no reasonable person would do this/believe this" then nothing would be illegal, there'd be no need to label any product as potentiality harmful, etc.

Do you really want to go there? That everything in the world would have a literal "caveat emptor" attached to it?

I thought Google labeled its AI summary with a disclaimer already. I don't want companies to be forced to only offer safe-for-children services.

And the european consumer doesn't want harmful products to be beta tested on the public.

It's unbelievable how lightly some people hand over the tools for mass manipulation to a single corporation in the name of freedom of all things. We're not talking about a laser pointer here.

Heck even laser pointers are regulated, now that we're thinking about it.

There is a disclaimer, yes, but you have to admit that it's pretty shit, innit? I mean for one, it's about the size of a human hair, and at least when I tried it, the disclaimer came up only when I clicked the "Show More" button. It might admittedly show up earlier if the response is shorter, admittedly I don't know. Also personally I'm a bit uneasy with the idea that just with a simple disclaimer they could avoid any and all liability. Not your argument, I know, but still.

As for not wanting to force companies to release only "safe-for-children products", I do actually agree. However I consider it to be a matter of degree, and in this case for example, I think that if nothing else, Google should say the very least make the disclaimer a bit more prominent and maybe tweak the model so that it's not quite as confident in its claims in the AI Overview.

> As for not wanting to force companies to release only "safe-for-children products", I do actually agree

That would be nice, but as every effort to restrict kids from using software which are not safe-for-children keeps getting condemned for being invasive surveilence, and every effort to stop kids getting the hardware instead gets condemned because of how much of society is now built on assumption everyone has a phone…

Something has to give.

Dunno what, but something.

Yeah, they could make it more prominent at the top. I would be fine if it said that "AI may give totally wrong answers" but that would never happen.

The harm was not done to the readers of the AI generated response, but to the defamed companies.

And yes, it is ok to remove choice if the existence of that choice violates other person’s rights.

Google can continue offering that choice if they make sure nobody is defamed.

So we deploy a technology no one should trust to the general public, for what exact reason?

So a very small number of people can get very rich off of the suffering of a massive number of other people I guess

Venture Capital 101! Welcome to Y Combinator :)

Land grab strategy 101.

Do you mean the responsible people who will ensure their algorithms can be trusted with the important task of acting in the best interest of said people? Try and get a defamatory statement about google from the AI search box.

There's plenty of examples of supposedly responsible people using LLM answers verbatim without any kind of overview by themselves e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/06/high-cour...

I have to fight with my family members when they "Google" something, read the top AI slop result, and I ask which page it came from. They believe what is on the Google landing page, and actually I don't think that is a naive assumption. Google has pushed itself as the information oracle, now they are delivering slop as the first result. It's a bait and switch.

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