3 ms·

at the scale that google is at, it doesn't make an ounce of sense to hold a company liable for a potential mistruth. what if there's a 1/1000 chance of some er

• gmerc 4mo ago
  So scale of harm creates immunity, is that the argument ?
  • necovek 4mo ago
    Did we not already see that with the financial sector in 2008?
    • intended 4mo ago
      Sort of ? 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.
  • drfloyd51 4mo ago
    Too big to fail. Lol.
  • onetokeoverthe 4mo ago
    [dead]
• Swizec 4mo ago
  > at the scale that google is at, it doesn't make an ounce of sense to hold a company liable for a potential mistruth If a Google employee (like a support agent) says a mistruth, the company is liable and you can sue. They can’t just say “hihi oopsies our support agents are useless”
• em-bee 4mo ago
  the user needs to use some judgement on the information they receive and have some critical thinking skills how? 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. google would be right to remove all AI results from germany i'd consider that a win.
  • SllX 4mo ago
    By checking the citations rather than taking what’s generated at face value. 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.
    • oaiey 4mo ago
      But you are not doing a 2 hour rabbit hole search when you stand in front of a T-shirt and check whether it is fair traded or all-american produced.
      • SllX 4mo ago
        If those are things you legitimately care about before you spend one penny on a T-Shirt, then you are. Or you did your research before hand. Or you’re just not buying the T-Shirt. 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.
        • isaacfrond 4mo ago
          You are confusing who is the party that is injured--as many in this thread are. We are not talking about the consumer who buys a non-fairtrade t-shirt, when he would rather had a fairtrade one. It's about the t-shirt producers who is legitimately fairtrade but whose business is now in the shitter because of a lying AI.
• Pay08 4mo ago
  Then Google can either discontinue their AI or make damn sure it's good.
• morkalork 4mo ago
  How do you feel about the EPA, industrial accidents, oil spills etc? Does scale give every company a free pass for damages?
  • bulbar 4mo ago
    That's not a fair comparison. If oil companies would get sued for every leak, they had to face millions of law suites and wouldn't be competitive anymore. (Sarcasm to support your argument)
• bulbar 4mo ago
  [dead]
• thfuran 4mo ago
  You’re seriously arguing that Google’s libel shouldn’t count as libel because they showed it to too many people? It’s absolutely insane to suggest that a company should be immune from liability for its actions if it operates on such scale that those actions harm millions of people every day on the basis that dealing with that many lawsuits would be too inconvenient.
  • 8note 4mo ago
    its not inaccurate though. 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.
    • oaiey 4mo ago
      But we agree that this was also wrong, right?
      • account42 4mo ago
        Yeah its wild to see people actually using "kill a million people and its a statistic" as a defense rather than to point out injustice.
    • intended 4mo ago
      Just because someone got away with it means everyone should get away with it ?
    • drawfloat 4mo ago
      No they got away with it through a combination of lax pharmaceutical laws, and because they were rich and connected to the officials who should have investigated them. They're also almost universally regarded as having committed evil acts at this point, so who cares why they got away with it?
  • drstewart 4mo ago
    Exactly, it's like saying Wikipedia shouldn't be liable and immediately shut down for any wrong information shown on it.
• OtomotO 4mo ago
  So once you get to that scale it suddenly doesn't matter anymore and you can't be held accountable. But until then, be a good citizen? What? That's fucking feudalism... Peasants and Lords. If you're lucky enough, you're born as a Lord. (And maybe don't live during a revolution) This makes no sense to me at all. If you're small you should get less bureaucracy than if you're bigger. For e.g. self driving cars there should not be any exemptions. There are people's lives at stake, people who didn't sign up for your shitty service.
• pdpi 4mo ago
  If I post “heathrow83829 is a convicted poopoo head” (replace with your favourite crime) as if it were a factual claim, you’d be well within your rights to sue me for defamation even if people should apply some critical thinking skills and say “wait a minute, how would pdpi know that? Are you sure he isn’t just talking out of his arse?” Now, search engines are usually afforded some amount of protection against defamation claims — they’re not held liable for simply indexing and quoting third party defamatory claims. Which is to say: Google wouldn’t be liable for claiming you’re a poopoo head if this comment shows up in search results. The point of this ruling is that AI-generated text isn’t a quote from a third party, it’s text generated by Google’s own tools, so it’s speech by Google itself. It might be wrong, sure, but it’s still presented as a statement of fact. At trial they can have the whole debate about whether Google was negligent in how they build their systems, and all that jazz, but let’s be clear here — it’s not a matter of every little factual mistake getting Google sued (and that would be absolutely terrifying from a freedom of speech perspective), but rather that the technical means by which you generate content doesn’t change your liability in publishing that content.
  • michaellee8 4mo ago
    I think Google added that AI-generated responses maybe incorrect? When you are paying such a low amount of cost, like probably for free, I don't think you can expect a same level of quality as a human written or reviewed of answer. It is like same random user spin up their Lovable and vibe-coded a piece of slop and hold Lovable responsible for not giving them production quality code. It is simple, you get what you paid for. If someone actually figured out AI that is actually always correct, it would be charged in superhuman price as well.
    • pdpi 4mo ago
      This case isn’t about Google’s users getting low-quality search results. As you say, you get what you pay for. The actual issue is that, in some searches, the AI summaries would claim the plaintiffs were guilty of scams and all-around shady business practices. Put differently: it’s not newspaper readers complaining the paper is inaccurate, it’s the people mentioned in the articles.
• NegativeK 4mo ago
  Only referencing America, but professional liability for doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc isn't based on perfection. It's based on a reasonable effort. 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.
• cik 4mo ago
  The problem with "the user" argument is the spectrum of users. There are different skills, capabilities, and intelligence. Frequently we wave our hands and say exactly this, critical thinking. But, not everyone is capable of that, nor is everyone capable to the same degree. As a society we decide. Are we embracing all users, are there basic rights and assunptions? Do we only enable some? As a free (as in cost to end user) system, Germany is arguing that their social compact raises the mininum bar. Frankly, thus might help drive a rush to increased accuracy for AI- tech finds a way. Equally it may hinder - beaurocracy creates barriers. I'd love to be able to rely on these search results. I see them ad the same prior set of inaccuracies whereby I have to do more research. At least now there's a summary and direct links to the supporting information. But equally, we're primed with the information in the summary.
  • autoexec 4mo ago
    > Frequently we wave our hands and say exactly this, critical thinking. But, not everyone is capable of that, nor is everyone capable to the same degree. It doesn't help that there have been active efforts for decades to prevent people from learning and developing critical thinking skills. We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. - The 2012 Texas Republican Party Platform (saying the quiet part out loud)
    • cik 4mo ago
      > It doesn't help that there have been active efforts for decades to prevent people from learning and developing critical thinking skills. This very much depends on where you live between state (US), and countries. Where I live, it's the complete reverse, critical thinking is baked into the population, into learning, into nigh everything. Our challenge is the complete lack of privacy, sadly.
• thisisit 4mo ago
  Google can be reasonably expected to not push pirated content to top if someone is searching for the “big hit music download” because they might be held liable for helping people with illegal downloads. But they shouldn’t be liable for misleading people? Being sued for billions of dollars by corporations vs millions by common folks is the difference
  • Gigachad 4mo ago
    There's also a difference between search engine results and this. Google is publishing their own text with false claims, not linking to another page that hosts it.
• lynx97 4mo ago
  > google would be right to remove all AI results from germany. As others already said, that would be a great outcome, and german citizens would benefit. It is a search engine. It used to have decent excerpts. It doesn't need hallucinated generative AI summaries. I am about to click the link anyway.
• globular-toast 4mo ago
  I'm seeing this sentiment more and more these days and it's worrying. Essentially people are starting to believe massive corporations should be able to get away with more than individuals. This is completely backwards considering the enormous impact a corporation can have, but that's what people are starting to think. I've heard people argue that corporations should be able to straight up lie and deceive to protect themselves, which is something you would not accept from a person.
  • f33d5173 4mo ago
    Corporations are you. Corporations provide a service to individuals, often in exchange for money. Restricting corporations from doing something is the same as restricting people from receiving that as a service.
    • account42 4mo ago
      I guess we're all just temporarily confused FAANGs.
      • f33d5173 4mo ago
        Banning faangs from doing something also bans small companies from doing it, and regardless prevents the user from receiving it as a service. You shouldn't let anger at large companies excuse stupid regulations.
        • danaris 4mo ago
          There's no reason this has to be the case. It's entirely possible for legislatures to attach clauses to restrictions that make them only apply to businesses above 50 employees, or above $1M ARR, or whatever.
  • autoexec 4mo ago
    It's probably got something to do with the billions/trillions of dollars corporations and industries have to push their chosen narrative onto an uneducated public. They've successfully turned a lot of people into suckers.
• dabinat 4mo ago
  I don’t know if critical thinking comes into it. If Google tells me “Company X is a terrible company that cheats its customers”, I don’t automatically know that’s false. It could very well be true. If I’ve got to look at the rest of the search results to figure that out anyway, what’s the point of the AI summary?
• silversmith 4mo ago
  Hang on, so you are arguing that responsibility for your product is just a phase you grow out of as a company?
• skeptic_ai 4mo ago
  So if I make a script to spam everywhere with 0.1% odds that is fake I can’t be sued? Just because I spam millions of times per day means I shouldn’t be liable for what I do right? But someone saying one time should go to prison. Makes sense /s
• kevinxsun 4mo ago
  At the scale that google is at, is the exact the reason they need to be hold accountable for any misconduct because the impact is so big. If google just display third party content only, then yes, users need to use their own judgement. But if google itself generate content instead and put out claims, due to it's scale and reputation, those content needs to be true because most of the people put trust in Google, so any untrue or false information especially defame others, Google is 100% liable, period. You clearly don't have the clear mind or mental capacity to analyze this situation, probably very slow.
• account42 4mo ago
  Should google also be allowed to assasinate a couple of people per day due to their scale? If they can't manage liability at their scale they they should scale down.
• BigTTYGothGF 4mo ago
  > at the scale that google is at, it doesn't make an ounce of sense to hold a company liable for a potential mistruth I, too, agree that google is too large and should be broken up into multiple smaller companies.