Google AI Overview court loss in Germany could spell doom for AI search industry.

Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.

The ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google’s AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other sketchy business practices. After smearing publishers by making affirmative statements like “Yes, [it] is known for dubious business practices and is often perceived as a scam,” Google failed to correct the misleading output, even after the publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year.

Google tried the usual arguments to shield itself from liability for false statements in AI Overviews, such as arguing that most users understand that AI outputs aren’t always accurate and must be verified.

  • MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish
    33·
    18 hours ago

    This isn’t new since ChatGPT and friends dropped. For years before that, Google search results did limited interpretation of natural language requests, not just keyword match frequency. The SEO arms race drove a different kind of AI in search fetching for at least a decade before natural language chatbot tech hit the scene.

    I don’t know how much is intentional enshittification to make AI results look better vs how much is simple neglect of the SEO arms race vs maybe it’s genuinely getting harder to deliver good simple search results with LLMs acting as SEO agents?

    What I do know is: “AI Mode” delivers more useful information than the old style page link list does these days. The pages linked from the AI Mode results tend to be relevant and useful more than the top page of page links. Hallucinations are way down from where they were 2+ years ago, even better than “top results” misses used to be, IMO. If you’re not getting enough sources in your first AI mode response, ask for more - it delivers.

    As was true since the first days of the internet: trust nothing. This is random junk people stick on the web for their own purposes, you have been warned.