A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previous limited liability protections for search engine operators don't apply to AI overviews. In this case, Google's AI had falsely linked two publishers to fraud and made claims that didn't appear in any of the linked sources. The ruling could set a precedent for AI-generated content liability worldwide.
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.
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.
The solution is text search. Has been for decades now. Search is good enough for these use cases, and proof of it is that nobody ever had to read a 300 page manual to fix such an issue.
Also, you know indexes exist, right?
If the issues are accuracy and cost, it means that it is a worse and less cost effective solution than just search. Unless you believe that LLMs can tell what’s true from what isn’t.
You really believe that these multi trillion companies don’t make a profit? That they offer their products for free? Such a naive take.
Text search is fine but not better than something that can both find you the most likely result you are looking for AND explain it to you if its too technical.
Text search is what Yahoo and Ask Jeeves did. Then Google improved on it by adding algorithmic search.
I bring up accuracy because its not 100% accurate. But if it works 85- 90 percent of the time, which it currently does according to benchmarks, that’s more efficient than Text search even accounting for times you need to adjust.
And no its not as cost efficient, but again I dont care as the end user because its not my cost.
Are you like, being purposefully ignorant here? I’m pointing out the fact that these trillion dollar companies weren’t profitable for years on end before they became so. And in the end their profitability is irrelevant to me. I don’t care how much AI costs them if they arent charging me for it.
And stop with your pedantic “you think free is free omg” argument. Go pay with actual money for your subpar searches then while your data is still being collected everywhere
There’s no such thing as “algorithmic search”. I don’t know where you got that term from, but again, not a thing. What Larry Page came up with was Pagerank, which is a ranking algorithm.
Citation needed. Where have you seen those numbers? Because there isn’t a single LLM out there that scores above 75% in publicly available benchmarks, for any given task. Meaning that there isn’t a LLM that does any benchmarked task with an accuracy above 75%, see https://llm-stats.com/
Right. What do you think it’s going to happen here in the near future? That companies like Google are going to absorb the costs without passing them to customers at all, ever? Let’s say that they don’t, because they are for profit companies after all, what’s your plan? Signing up for a couple dozen free accounts to keep using them and become sort of a “LLM vagrant”?
But let’s say they don’t charge you ever. How do you think they are going to profit from you? Currently we know, they track your every move, you essentially pay with your privacy. Or you think they won’t? That they will forever lose money?
I guess the part I don’t understand here is that you must know that all these companies make money from their users, one way or another, and still you believe you aren’t paying for any of it. Are you ok with how they make that money, then?
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.
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.
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.
Correct, and that is as it should be. Apply the same logic to a human written piece and you will see that.
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.
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.
There’s a difference between you making use of a tool and you publishing the results of that tool.
Why should a vendor be able to make false claims about a product with impunity?