Court holds Google liable for false claims in AI Overviews. Seems significant.
"A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate 'independent, new, and substantive statements' by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites" the-decoder
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.
the-decoder.com
A decent rule or thumb is that when you happen upon really egregious misconduct, it’s unlikely that you just fortunately stumbled upon the first unique instance. More often it escalated to be that bad via a lot of lesser infractions for which there were no consequences.
Publishers aren't infallible either, but Google serves millions of wrong answers an hour.
"If enough of that wrong content defames companies or individuals, it could become a serious legal problem not just for Google but for other providers of similar services like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity"
Speedrunners say "save the animals". But Crocomire is an animal. So here we see the fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of liberal capitalism