The interesting thing about the German court ruling against Google is not the verdict.
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The interesting thing about the German court ruling against Google is not the verdict. The fact that, if you put libel on your web site, you are liable for it even if you used a machine to automatically generate libel, should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the law at any point in the last century or so: humans have agency, the tools that they use do not shield them from liability, no matter how obfuscating they are.
The bit I suspect will have much more impact longer term is one of the defences entered by Google's lawyers. Somewhat more verbose in the original German, but it boiled down to: Everyone knows LLMs produce nonsense, no one should ever trust the output of an LLM in any situation that matters, it's not Google's fault if people read the output of an LLM and believed it might have some connection to reality.
It's debatable whether everyone knows that, but this is now an official statement entered into the court record that at least one of the major LLM vendors knows this. And that's now an on-the-record statement made under penalty of perjury that can be entered as evidence in any court case against companies selling LLM-integrated tooling.
I suspect that this will show up in a lot of court cases over the next few years and probably have a much bigger long-term impact than the ruling. Any claim about utility made by vendors of 'AI' tools is now open to lawsuits ranging from misleading advertising to outright fraud as a result of this.
Google would probably have been much better advised to settle the case rather than enter that claim as evidence. Imagine if a car manufacturer had entered a defence against liability in case of a collision by saying 'everyone knows automobiles are impossible to operate safely on the roads and anyone who buys one should know better than to take it on the public highway'. Google's lawyers have just done the equivalent for the 'AI' industry.
EDIT: It hopefully goes without saying, but just in case: I am not a lawyer, this is commentary from someone who watches the industry with a growing sense of disgust, not legal advice.
@david_chisnall
Google's famous slogan, "Don't be evil," should probably be updated to: "Don't be as evil as we are."
#Google #LLM #Liability #Ai -
@c0dec0dec0de
so you're saying one Tucker Carlson is much easier to remove than one "AI overview" ?
@syn @david_chisnall@wolf480pl @syn @david_chisnall I think I’m agreeing that the economic implications are more likely to have an effect when they’re applied to a technology that cannot be trusted rather than a person who cannot be trusted (even if that person is emblematic of a large cohort of similar grifters). While Fox News claim that its evening shows are entertainment and contain no actual information could be made to stick to the individual hosts, Google admitting that LLMs aren’t fit for purpose could meaningfully be attached to the whole category of technology and not just Gemini (that’s Google’s Lying Language Mangler, right?).
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The interesting thing about the German court ruling against Google is not the verdict. The fact that, if you put libel on your web site, you are liable for it even if you used a machine to automatically generate libel, should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the law at any point in the last century or so: humans have agency, the tools that they use do not shield them from liability, no matter how obfuscating they are.
The bit I suspect will have much more impact longer term is one of the defences entered by Google's lawyers. Somewhat more verbose in the original German, but it boiled down to: Everyone knows LLMs produce nonsense, no one should ever trust the output of an LLM in any situation that matters, it's not Google's fault if people read the output of an LLM and believed it might have some connection to reality.
It's debatable whether everyone knows that, but this is now an official statement entered into the court record that at least one of the major LLM vendors knows this. And that's now an on-the-record statement made under penalty of perjury that can be entered as evidence in any court case against companies selling LLM-integrated tooling.
I suspect that this will show up in a lot of court cases over the next few years and probably have a much bigger long-term impact than the ruling. Any claim about utility made by vendors of 'AI' tools is now open to lawsuits ranging from misleading advertising to outright fraud as a result of this.
Google would probably have been much better advised to settle the case rather than enter that claim as evidence. Imagine if a car manufacturer had entered a defence against liability in case of a collision by saying 'everyone knows automobiles are impossible to operate safely on the roads and anyone who buys one should know better than to take it on the public highway'. Google's lawyers have just done the equivalent for the 'AI' industry.
EDIT: It hopefully goes without saying, but just in case: I am not a lawyer, this is commentary from someone who watches the industry with a growing sense of disgust, not legal advice.
@david_chisnall wait.... so google actually rocked up to the court with the fox news 'no reasonably intelligent person would mistake out programming for news, and if you do you are a fucking moron' business model??
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From the decoder's writeup:
At the hearing, Google argued that users could check the linked sources themselves to verify whether the AI summary was correct. Users generally knew "that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted," the company claimed. That's a remarkable statement given the scale at which Google serves AI overviews. It's also not entirely true, since the connection between sources and generated content isn't always there.
The court rejected this. The possibility of disproving a statement through further research doesn't "regularly exempt from liability for this statement." The AI overview was "understandable on its own" and contained "a self-contained statement with independently understandable content and no reference to other possible interpretations or even unreliable content." Studies show that users almost never click on sources in AI overviews, which supports the court's reasoning.
@david_chisnall It's a little bit too complicated for now, so never mind.
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@eschwartz that is neither an accurate summary of the original toot nor of the legal situation
@eschwartz Yes, Google going on record and admitting they know LLMs are fallible MAY make them liable to false advertising charges in the future, as David points out. But they can just add some weaselly legalese to their ads, à la "Copilot is for entertainment purposes only", and people will still believe the bullshit, despite the disclaimer saying outright that the bullshit is bullshit.
The impact will be very limited, is my point.
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@david_chisnall that's absolutely fascinating, the argument is somehow that it is a work of complete fiction which is derived from non-fictional sources(assumed). I guess we are back to the impossibility of validation. Does this stop them cold? Or do we have to wait until other countries test the same case.
@david_chisnall further, I would wonder whether they could simply change their format to provide references with excerpts from those references. I can hope.
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@eschwartz Yes, Google going on record and admitting they know LLMs are fallible MAY make them liable to false advertising charges in the future, as David points out. But they can just add some weaselly legalese to their ads, à la "Copilot is for entertainment purposes only", and people will still believe the bullshit, despite the disclaimer saying outright that the bullshit is bullshit.
The impact will be very limited, is my point.
@eschwartz And yes, there is a line where you can no longer waive liability with a disclaimer. I'm sure Google will manage to find exactly where that line is.
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@cstross @DJGummikuh @david_chisnall
Meanwhile in the guitar world, Fender Guitars’ lawyers and upper management are commiting brand suicide.Is there a reason these cases are being tried in German courts?
@JamesPadraicR @cstross @DJGummikuh @david_chisnall because US courts are hopelessly corrupt? Those suits wouldn't stand a gnat's chance in a hurricane here in the USA, unfortunately.
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@cstross @DJGummikuh @david_chisnall
Meanwhile in the guitar world, Fender Guitars’ lawyers and upper management are commiting brand suicide.Is there a reason these cases are being tried in German courts?
@JamesPadraicR @cstross @DJGummikuh @david_chisnall Maybe because Germany has something that looks like rule-of-law?
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The interesting thing about the German court ruling against Google is not the verdict. The fact that, if you put libel on your web site, you are liable for it even if you used a machine to automatically generate libel, should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the law at any point in the last century or so: humans have agency, the tools that they use do not shield them from liability, no matter how obfuscating they are.
The bit I suspect will have much more impact longer term is one of the defences entered by Google's lawyers. Somewhat more verbose in the original German, but it boiled down to: Everyone knows LLMs produce nonsense, no one should ever trust the output of an LLM in any situation that matters, it's not Google's fault if people read the output of an LLM and believed it might have some connection to reality.
It's debatable whether everyone knows that, but this is now an official statement entered into the court record that at least one of the major LLM vendors knows this. And that's now an on-the-record statement made under penalty of perjury that can be entered as evidence in any court case against companies selling LLM-integrated tooling.
I suspect that this will show up in a lot of court cases over the next few years and probably have a much bigger long-term impact than the ruling. Any claim about utility made by vendors of 'AI' tools is now open to lawsuits ranging from misleading advertising to outright fraud as a result of this.
Google would probably have been much better advised to settle the case rather than enter that claim as evidence. Imagine if a car manufacturer had entered a defence against liability in case of a collision by saying 'everyone knows automobiles are impossible to operate safely on the roads and anyone who buys one should know better than to take it on the public highway'. Google's lawyers have just done the equivalent for the 'AI' industry.
EDIT: It hopefully goes without saying, but just in case: I am not a lawyer, this is commentary from someone who watches the industry with a growing sense of disgust, not legal advice.
@david_chisnall Meh, they'll just announce that their next model is so much more advanced that the claim no longer applies. "Oh no, you see, that was for LAST month's LLMs..."
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@david_chisnall It's like when Microsoft said Copilot was for entertainment purposes only and everybody immediately stopped using it for serious applications... wait, no, they didn't.
AI boosters are just gonna rationalize it as "well they HAD TO say that, it was just a court strategy, they don't really MEAN it" and nothing's gonna change.
@ratsnakegames @david_chisnall like when any psychic medium performs a stage show they need to say (in the UK at least) that they’re not claiming to be able to talk to the dead and that their performance is for entertainment purposes only. Yet more often than not the audience members fully believe the entertaining performer is a genuine spiritualist with a connection to the other side and wouldn’t have bought tickets otherwise. The boilerplate is passed off as a legal necessity, at odds with the overall impression being created and sold.
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@DJGummikuh @david_chisnall "Google's lawyers" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here! As is always the case, there will be mutiple different law firms working for Google in different legal systems and jurisdictions, with different understandings of their customer's priorities and needs. Obviously somebody drafting that submission didn't realize that Google is an AI firm first, not an advertising firm or a search firm, and they were undermining their customers' highest priority.
@cstross @DJGummikuh @david_chisnall Not sure if Google's intention is to *stay* an AI company though. That market is starting to fail. There's no profits in these kinds of AI search responses -- especially with these kinds of legal concerns.
Have you seen Google's paper on token auctions for those AI responses? Is Google still the one liable if they're just forwarding the response written by an advertisers' AI? And who is liable if that response is written by four different advertiser AIs?
Google has never been a content production business. They're a distributor. But AI threatens to merge the two and they've now been forced into the production business just to keep up. Killing that merger might not be so bad for Google...
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@david_chisnall further, I would wonder whether they could simply change their format to provide references with excerpts from those references. I can hope.
This is really hard. LLMs don't actually understand anything, so doesn't know the difference between a real claim, an in-character sarcastic statement, and so on. Out of context quoting to mislead can also be illegal in a similar way.
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The interesting thing about the German court ruling against Google is not the verdict. The fact that, if you put libel on your web site, you are liable for it even if you used a machine to automatically generate libel, should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the law at any point in the last century or so: humans have agency, the tools that they use do not shield them from liability, no matter how obfuscating they are.
The bit I suspect will have much more impact longer term is one of the defences entered by Google's lawyers. Somewhat more verbose in the original German, but it boiled down to: Everyone knows LLMs produce nonsense, no one should ever trust the output of an LLM in any situation that matters, it's not Google's fault if people read the output of an LLM and believed it might have some connection to reality.
It's debatable whether everyone knows that, but this is now an official statement entered into the court record that at least one of the major LLM vendors knows this. And that's now an on-the-record statement made under penalty of perjury that can be entered as evidence in any court case against companies selling LLM-integrated tooling.
I suspect that this will show up in a lot of court cases over the next few years and probably have a much bigger long-term impact than the ruling. Any claim about utility made by vendors of 'AI' tools is now open to lawsuits ranging from misleading advertising to outright fraud as a result of this.
Google would probably have been much better advised to settle the case rather than enter that claim as evidence. Imagine if a car manufacturer had entered a defence against liability in case of a collision by saying 'everyone knows automobiles are impossible to operate safely on the roads and anyone who buys one should know better than to take it on the public highway'. Google's lawyers have just done the equivalent for the 'AI' industry.
EDIT: It hopefully goes without saying, but just in case: I am not a lawyer, this is commentary from someone who watches the industry with a growing sense of disgust, not legal advice.
@david_chisnall The car comparison is interesting though; the law knows that cars will crash and kill people - and that's acceptable; that's why everyone is forced to have 3rd party insurance and why there are traffic offences.
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The interesting thing about the German court ruling against Google is not the verdict. The fact that, if you put libel on your web site, you are liable for it even if you used a machine to automatically generate libel, should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the law at any point in the last century or so: humans have agency, the tools that they use do not shield them from liability, no matter how obfuscating they are.
The bit I suspect will have much more impact longer term is one of the defences entered by Google's lawyers. Somewhat more verbose in the original German, but it boiled down to: Everyone knows LLMs produce nonsense, no one should ever trust the output of an LLM in any situation that matters, it's not Google's fault if people read the output of an LLM and believed it might have some connection to reality.
It's debatable whether everyone knows that, but this is now an official statement entered into the court record that at least one of the major LLM vendors knows this. And that's now an on-the-record statement made under penalty of perjury that can be entered as evidence in any court case against companies selling LLM-integrated tooling.
I suspect that this will show up in a lot of court cases over the next few years and probably have a much bigger long-term impact than the ruling. Any claim about utility made by vendors of 'AI' tools is now open to lawsuits ranging from misleading advertising to outright fraud as a result of this.
Google would probably have been much better advised to settle the case rather than enter that claim as evidence. Imagine if a car manufacturer had entered a defence against liability in case of a collision by saying 'everyone knows automobiles are impossible to operate safely on the roads and anyone who buys one should know better than to take it on the public highway'. Google's lawyers have just done the equivalent for the 'AI' industry.
EDIT: It hopefully goes without saying, but just in case: I am not a lawyer, this is commentary from someone who watches the industry with a growing sense of disgust, not legal advice.
@david_chisnall The effect of the wealthiest, striving to oppress the masses for more profits, by interjecting more complexity for failing judicial systems to enforce, is old hat in classic divide and conquer strategy.
The bottom line is that these abusers have to be replaced, as soon as possible.
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@cstross @DJGummikuh @david_chisnall someone should give that lawyer a raise.
@unkx @cstross @DJGummikuh @david_chisnall It would be very funny to effectively have their opponents donate to their lawyers for making their lives probably easier in the future.
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The interesting thing about the German court ruling against Google is not the verdict. The fact that, if you put libel on your web site, you are liable for it even if you used a machine to automatically generate libel, should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the law at any point in the last century or so: humans have agency, the tools that they use do not shield them from liability, no matter how obfuscating they are.
The bit I suspect will have much more impact longer term is one of the defences entered by Google's lawyers. Somewhat more verbose in the original German, but it boiled down to: Everyone knows LLMs produce nonsense, no one should ever trust the output of an LLM in any situation that matters, it's not Google's fault if people read the output of an LLM and believed it might have some connection to reality.
It's debatable whether everyone knows that, but this is now an official statement entered into the court record that at least one of the major LLM vendors knows this. And that's now an on-the-record statement made under penalty of perjury that can be entered as evidence in any court case against companies selling LLM-integrated tooling.
I suspect that this will show up in a lot of court cases over the next few years and probably have a much bigger long-term impact than the ruling. Any claim about utility made by vendors of 'AI' tools is now open to lawsuits ranging from misleading advertising to outright fraud as a result of this.
Google would probably have been much better advised to settle the case rather than enter that claim as evidence. Imagine if a car manufacturer had entered a defence against liability in case of a collision by saying 'everyone knows automobiles are impossible to operate safely on the roads and anyone who buys one should know better than to take it on the public highway'. Google's lawyers have just done the equivalent for the 'AI' industry.
EDIT: It hopefully goes without saying, but just in case: I am not a lawyer, this is commentary from someone who watches the industry with a growing sense of disgust, not legal advice.
@david_chisnall Would you happen to have a link to a more or less official publication of the German original?
> Somewhat more verbose in the original German
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@david_chisnall Would you happen to have a link to a more or less official publication of the German original?
> Somewhat more verbose in the original German
@jores Someone did post it earlier, I'm relying on other summaries (sorry, the quoted bit was intended as a joke).
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The interesting thing about the German court ruling against Google is not the verdict. The fact that, if you put libel on your web site, you are liable for it even if you used a machine to automatically generate libel, should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the law at any point in the last century or so: humans have agency, the tools that they use do not shield them from liability, no matter how obfuscating they are.
The bit I suspect will have much more impact longer term is one of the defences entered by Google's lawyers. Somewhat more verbose in the original German, but it boiled down to: Everyone knows LLMs produce nonsense, no one should ever trust the output of an LLM in any situation that matters, it's not Google's fault if people read the output of an LLM and believed it might have some connection to reality.
It's debatable whether everyone knows that, but this is now an official statement entered into the court record that at least one of the major LLM vendors knows this. And that's now an on-the-record statement made under penalty of perjury that can be entered as evidence in any court case against companies selling LLM-integrated tooling.
I suspect that this will show up in a lot of court cases over the next few years and probably have a much bigger long-term impact than the ruling. Any claim about utility made by vendors of 'AI' tools is now open to lawsuits ranging from misleading advertising to outright fraud as a result of this.
Google would probably have been much better advised to settle the case rather than enter that claim as evidence. Imagine if a car manufacturer had entered a defence against liability in case of a collision by saying 'everyone knows automobiles are impossible to operate safely on the roads and anyone who buys one should know better than to take it on the public highway'. Google's lawyers have just done the equivalent for the 'AI' industry.
EDIT: It hopefully goes without saying, but just in case: I am not a lawyer, this is commentary from someone who watches the industry with a growing sense of disgust, not legal advice.
@david_chisnall People said the same about Fox News's 'it's entertainment, not news, actually' defense, but as far as I've heard this has not really boiled off into anything?
(and Lindt with their 'actually, it's not expertly crafted with the finest ingredients' statement)
Also, Gemini literally has 'Gemini is AI and can make mistakes. ' written on the page, so I don't think they're *admitting* anything new here.
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The interesting thing about the German court ruling against Google is not the verdict. The fact that, if you put libel on your web site, you are liable for it even if you used a machine to automatically generate libel, should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the law at any point in the last century or so: humans have agency, the tools that they use do not shield them from liability, no matter how obfuscating they are.
The bit I suspect will have much more impact longer term is one of the defences entered by Google's lawyers. Somewhat more verbose in the original German, but it boiled down to: Everyone knows LLMs produce nonsense, no one should ever trust the output of an LLM in any situation that matters, it's not Google's fault if people read the output of an LLM and believed it might have some connection to reality.
It's debatable whether everyone knows that, but this is now an official statement entered into the court record that at least one of the major LLM vendors knows this. And that's now an on-the-record statement made under penalty of perjury that can be entered as evidence in any court case against companies selling LLM-integrated tooling.
I suspect that this will show up in a lot of court cases over the next few years and probably have a much bigger long-term impact than the ruling. Any claim about utility made by vendors of 'AI' tools is now open to lawsuits ranging from misleading advertising to outright fraud as a result of this.
Google would probably have been much better advised to settle the case rather than enter that claim as evidence. Imagine if a car manufacturer had entered a defence against liability in case of a collision by saying 'everyone knows automobiles are impossible to operate safely on the roads and anyone who buys one should know better than to take it on the public highway'. Google's lawyers have just done the equivalent for the 'AI' industry.
EDIT: It hopefully goes without saying, but just in case: I am not a lawyer, this is commentary from someone who watches the industry with a growing sense of disgust, not legal advice.
Sounds like Fox News claiming everyone knows it's just entertainment not news. The US judges bought that. I'm glad the German ones didn't.
