Also I am not entirely certain your statement is correct - which false claim does the article make exactly?

But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country. AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits. Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.

Mercedes-Benz does this in limited cases. Waymo does it generally. (In China, Level 4 and 5 transfers risk to the manufacturer. This is the correct way to do it.)

> AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses

I doubt that will be the case, because of the long tail problem. (same with self driving cars and other ML related problems).

In fact, we have counter-examples today. Newspapers (even reputable ones) can't get it right every time, despite the fact that they have both trained people and in theory they're setup to catch that w/ reporters - fact checkers - editors. And still, from time to time, they get it wrong. (and I'm not talking about purposefully getting it wrong, just honest mistakes.)

What will likely happen with a ruling like this is that the answers will be hedged and legalesed and muddied up the wazoo.

for now only volvo accepts liability, and only for "slow crawl mode"

Well.. I mean.. yeah? I don't think this is as bad as you think it is.

Have you looked at SV and its product offerings recently? It's mostly just enshittified gamified value extraction that doesn't respect the user at all.

"If you do not let us do all this the way we want, we will take away your ability to use our shit" hits different when the "shit" in that sentence is actually just "shit".

What sounds like a win to me. I certainly hope my country makes it dangerous for companies to break the law and/or harm the public with shitty products that aren't ready to be released legally/safely.

Let someone else sacrifice the safety of their populace.

Heck - self driving is the fastest way to authoritarian government in practice. I’m surprised more people on HN haven’t cottoned on to that fact.

A self driving system will naturally build networks to share road state.

This network will eventually shift over to the government having the ability to manage how traffic should move during emergencies.

And at that point the government can easily decide where your car should go.

The inevitability of this outcome is blindingly obvious.

It’s highly beneficial to let other nations experiment and simply be followers.

As far as I can tell the ruling is more nuanced. If AI is defaming you, there needs to be a way to correct the record.

A company being open to liability does not mean it is always liable, just that it can be if it really messes up (especially if there are aggravating circumstances, e.g. you need to drag them to court to issue a correction).

What profit? I don't know either but they enabled this for a reason right?

This doesn’t sound convincing. What AI and what company?

LLMs don’t seem like they will ever be reliable like that.

Self driving like waymo might be?

Correct, most jurisdictions do not allow businesses which cannot be held liable for their actions. This is pretty core to a modern society.

Imagine if a company selling Knicks tickets was not expected to then actually provide said tickets and there was simply nothing you could do about it. Oopsies our sales page is for entertainment purposes only

To be fair, the internet has spent some 30 years figuring out how this works and it’s still not fully resolved. For the most part we’ve agreed that companies must follow the laws of both where they live and where they operate. This wasn’t always obvious!

If Waymo can be proven negligent or something, then sure, bleed em dry. But as long as they're acting in good faith and significantly reducing overall road fatalities per mile driven, I think it's actually pretty unreasonable to try to hold them to such a high standard you end up subjecting society to more of the higher fatality rates caused by humans.

If they want to claim ownership, then they will have to accept responsibility.

Self-driving cars don't need to be particularly good for companies to make models where they accept liability in some circumstances, and the cars refuse to drive in other circumstances.

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.

Time to set my VPN location to Germany. I'm tired of the "udm" trick.

This is a gigantic own goal for Google. The average person’s impression is that Google AI is much worse than ChatGPT, even though that’s not actually the case. Google is shoving a terrible model in everyone’s faces.

True. But you never know if / when there will be a new big breakthrough in AI, which will probably be based on a new architecture / paradigm, i.e. it won't be LLM-based

Probably not, for the same reason search results aren't an issue.

Businesses are made to make it easier to share profits and responsibilities when trying to fulfill users wants. Laws are made to offer protections for consumers (because nobody has time for common sense), but at the end of the day the consumer has to take responsibility or no products can be made. If you're too fat for a chair, it's on you to find or make one that works- not every product is for every person. Laws only stop chairs being sold that are too dangerous for anyone.

I don't think Tesla is based in China

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.

They are also no longer covered by safe harbour provisions because it is them answering it, not some content they refer you to.

It's hard to see if the individual complaints really support a general problem, or if this simply the only result that talks about "scam + business-name". Probably, the latter.

The same problem happens on google search, if you look "<obscure false fact>", you'll get pages mentioning that false fact. If you fall into the trap of confirmation bias, it leads you to think the false fact is in true.

There is a subtle difference in stating it as a search summary compared to an opinionated answer. Most users are always going to treat it as a response from google instead of search results where the user is still responsible for understanding and come up with their own interpretation.

This is probably the right step in some sense to make one liable for their statements/assertions.

(What's the alternative, after all? Having no one responsible for what the AI summary says is clearly untenable.)

Broad defamation laws always have overwhelmingly negative consequences.

Yes, and it's called defamation when you don't follow it.

This is why you have to say "I think this person is a murderer" and not "This person is a murderer."

One is opinion. One is fact.

This isn't super hard.

Freedom as in freedom of private property can only be guaranteed by the State. The State watches over its own population and makes sure that private property, i.e. capital and work, is made productive, so people go to work, businesses make profits, and everybody pays taxes. Taxes are the State's prime source of income.

When all these million of private interests collide, which they are bound to do, the State provides a jurisdictional system that has to decide between those private interests and the State's own interests.

E.g.: If a business owner refuses access to medical patents or to lower prices and safe potentially people's lives, the State has to decide between that immediate interest and its own interests, which is protecting private capital, as its source of income. Since I'm in Germany: In the emission scandal Volkswagen didn't just physically harm people, VW violated the private property of millions of customers. Despite that, the German State sided with Volkswagen the larger capital and did nothing. During Corona, the German State refused to open patents for a limited time to help safe people's lives in poor countries. Doing so would've violated the interest of private capital, so it refused. In contrast, if I as an individual refuse to help somebody in an emergency, the State would either fine me or put me in jail. In this case, people's lives become the State's prime interests, because they are also the State's source of income, as a productive workforce.

How would that be the company's action? The only way the business might be liable is if they advertised their product as safe to use when lighting yourself on fire or if there was already some law that required them to warn customers not to light themselves on fire while using the product and they ignored that law.

In this case, it's not about what somebody else did. It's what Google did. There were already laws against lying about companies by saying they did illegal things when they didn't, google broke the law, so that's what google got in trouble for.

Consumer protection laws aren't there to replace common sense, they're there to prevent things like outright fraud and poisonings/murder.

Genuinely, by far the most common situation where claims of defamation arise in Germany is any less than 5 star review left to a business on google maps.

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

I found one time Musk was using a few seconds of disengagement to insult a driver, but it still would have counted as an FSD crash by Tesla's statistics.

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.

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.

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.

Put differently: it’s not newspaper readers complaining the paper is inaccurate, it’s the people mentioned in the articles.

They're also almost universally regarded as having committed evil acts at this point, so who cares why they got away with it?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.