A court in Munich declared that Google is liable for their "AI summaries" and all its hallucinations.
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What's the difference between an LLM and a pack of cigarettes?
They both fill the room with smoke that will eventually kill someone. But cigarettes come with a warning.
@mizkirsten
Finally -
A court in Munich declared that Google is liable for their "AI summaries" and all its hallucinations. This is an important step to bring "AI" slop in line with all other products on the market: "AI" products are basically the only ones where a provider can just deliver unchecked garbage and put all the liability on the consumer. I hope to see aggressive change here.
Excellent verdict, actions have consequences…
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A court in Munich declared that Google is liable for their "AI summaries" and all its hallucinations. This is an important step to bring "AI" slop in line with all other products on the market: "AI" products are basically the only ones where a provider can just deliver unchecked garbage and put all the liability on the consumer. I hope to see aggressive change here.
Hallucinations aren't Google's fault, and they can't just fix them. It's a property of AI. So just don't use it for topics you don't understand. And frankly, I don't know anyone who still uses Google. Even my mom uses DuckDuckGo.
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Google's defence needs to be amplified by anyone talking to politicians about 'AI' regulation:
Google is explicitly saying in their legal filing that the outputs from their LLM should not be trusted and that users should know that.
That's one hell of an admission. Imagine saying that about any other category of product.
@david_chisnall Don't most software licences, particularly FOSS ones, say that?
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Google's defence needs to be amplified by anyone talking to politicians about 'AI' regulation:
Google is explicitly saying in their legal filing that the outputs from their LLM should not be trusted and that users should know that.
That's one hell of an admission. Imagine saying that about any other category of product.
@david_chisnall @tante I see nothing shocking in that admission. AI abilities are jagged - in some areas exceptional (radiology) and in other prone to error. Like any human.
The key to judging its veracity is based on the strength of the citations it provides and what other sources are saying about the questions we ask of it.
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A court in Munich declared that Google is liable for their "AI summaries" and all its hallucinations. This is an important step to bring "AI" slop in line with all other products on the market: "AI" products are basically the only ones where a provider can just deliver unchecked garbage and put all the liability on the consumer. I hope to see aggressive change here.
@tante
**A historical and necessary decision.** Holding companies accountable for AI "hallucinations" brings technology closer to the real world, where every product needs quality control and safety. Consumers shouldn't bear the burden of filtering out others' mistakes. Here's to responsible evolution!
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A court in Munich declared that Google is liable for their "AI summaries" and all its hallucinations. This is an important step to bring "AI" slop in line with all other products on the market: "AI" products are basically the only ones where a provider can just deliver unchecked garbage and put all the liability on the consumer. I hope to see aggressive change here.
@tante the solution is on the way: fusion powered quantum ai. Invest now before everyone else does!
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@david_chisnall Don't most software licences, particularly FOSS ones, say that?
No, they say that the product comes with no liabilities. That limitation of liability is not absolute and is restricted to the degree to which laws allow liability to be disclaimed. If you put something actively malicious in an open-source project, that license doesn't absolve you.
If you make explicit claims about the product, then a license saying 'actually, does not do the things that we claimed it can do' will not protect you against fraud claims.
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Google's defence needs to be amplified by anyone talking to politicians about 'AI' regulation:
Google is explicitly saying in their legal filing that the outputs from their LLM should not be trusted and that users should know that.
That's one hell of an admission. Imagine saying that about any other category of product.
@david_chisnall @tante that's the same defense Nigel Farage uses "I wasn't inciting a riot, I was just asking questions!". Although it seems by now he is so confident in the right-wing media barons who promote him that he even dispensed with the pretense of plausible deniability.
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Google's defence needs to be amplified by anyone talking to politicians about 'AI' regulation:
Google is explicitly saying in their legal filing that the outputs from their LLM should not be trusted and that users should know that.
That's one hell of an admission. Imagine saying that about any other category of product.
@david_chisnall @tante bc on linux says "without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE." which my old school calculator (from 1970s that still works) does not...
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A court in Munich declared that Google is liable for their "AI summaries" and all its hallucinations. This is an important step to bring "AI" slop in line with all other products on the market: "AI" products are basically the only ones where a provider can just deliver unchecked garbage and put all the liability on the consumer. I hope to see aggressive change here.
@tante virtually all of the modern ills of social media platforms can be fixed by just applying the pre-existing laws. Fraud is pretty much illegal everywhere, so is acting like a csam generator, facilitating terrorism, theft, etc.
Modern Western criminal courts have evolved to find and punish the poor, they exist in their own echo chambers of corruption where they lack the expertise, and the ability to challenge larger firms. -
@david_chisnall @tante bc on linux says "without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE." which my old school calculator (from 1970s that still works) does not...
As I've said elsewhere today:
There are strict legal limits on where you can limit liability. Your calculator can't have that disclaimer at all because (in both the EU and USA) there are very strict limits on disclaimers of liability for physical machines (which is an issue that comes up in open-source hardware quite often).
Even in software, claiming in your marketing that your product does one thing and then having a disclaimer in the license that says that it does not, in fact, do that thing is generally a problem: you may not be liable for the damages from failing to do the thing, but there's a good chance that you're liable for fraud. A disclaimer of liability isn't a get out of jail free card, it's a statement of intent.
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Google's defence needs to be amplified by anyone talking to politicians about 'AI' regulation:
Google is explicitly saying in their legal filing that the outputs from their LLM should not be trusted and that users should know that.
That's one hell of an admission. Imagine saying that about any other category of product.
@david_chisnall @tante Completely on-brand for the software industry, famous for "no promises, no warranties" EULA bullshit.
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A court in Munich declared that Google is liable for their "AI summaries" and all its hallucinations. This is an important step to bring "AI" slop in line with all other products on the market: "AI" products are basically the only ones where a provider can just deliver unchecked garbage and put all the liability on the consumer. I hope to see aggressive change here.
@tante Good article. Too bad that the fall down at the end: '... the fallout could hit not just Google but every AI provider whose systems paraphrase content from the web.'
The whole point is that ai(llm) is not paraphrasing content from the web. It is making shit up.
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@david_chisnall @tante I see nothing shocking in that admission. AI abilities are jagged - in some areas exceptional (radiology) and in other prone to error. Like any human.
The key to judging its veracity is based on the strength of the citations it provides and what other sources are saying about the questions we ask of it.
@lymphomation @david_chisnall @tante
AI abilities are "jagged" because AI is an umbrella term for a bunch of disparate technologies and the AI used for radiology is almost entirely unrelated to the AI at issue here -
@lymphomation @david_chisnall @tante
AI abilities are "jagged" because AI is an umbrella term for a bunch of disparate technologies and the AI used for radiology is almost entirely unrelated to the AI at issue here@lymphomation @david_chisnall @tante
As for judging the veracity of LLM output based on its citations and what other sources say, by the time you've done that, you would've done better not to use an LLM at all - it would've been both less work and higher quality output -
@lymphomation @david_chisnall @tante
As for judging the veracity of LLM output based on its citations and what other sources say, by the time you've done that, you would've done better not to use an LLM at all - it would've been both less work and higher quality outputIt's also not good. It turns out that existing ML models trained on x-ray data overfit on specific measurement errors for individual x-ray machines and produce surprisingly poor results when you try to use them on a different x-ray machine, of the same model in the same hospital, let alone a different model.
There was a paper published near the start of the year debunking a load of the claims about ML in radiology.
But that doesn't stop it being the go-to example for boosters.
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A court in Munich declared that Google is liable for their "AI summaries" and all its hallucinations. This is an important step to bring "AI" slop in line with all other products on the market: "AI" products are basically the only ones where a provider can just deliver unchecked garbage and put all the liability on the consumer. I hope to see aggressive change here.
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As I've said elsewhere today:
There are strict legal limits on where you can limit liability. Your calculator can't have that disclaimer at all because (in both the EU and USA) there are very strict limits on disclaimers of liability for physical machines (which is an issue that comes up in open-source hardware quite often).
Even in software, claiming in your marketing that your product does one thing and then having a disclaimer in the license that says that it does not, in fact, do that thing is generally a problem: you may not be liable for the damages from failing to do the thing, but there's a good chance that you're liable for fraud. A disclaimer of liability isn't a get out of jail free card, it's a statement of intent.
@david_chisnall @tante once more, the law makes arbitrary distinctions. What if I grow a biological calculator? (which one can...)
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@david_chisnall @tante once more, the law makes arbitrary distinctions. What if I grow a biological calculator? (which one can...)
It's not really an arbitrary distinction. The relevant law treats software as a component. The liabilities apply to a final product. The product liability laws cover products delivered to customers. It's the responsibility of the product builder to ensure that components meet the requirements and to use contract law to enforce any liability that's necessary to propagate along the supply chain.
The EU's CRA takes a similar view: an open-source project does not have any liability but a product that incorporates that project must do its own due diligence to ensure compliance.
