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.
I’ve used it to search some techniques on simulations as all it does is link me to some developer pages saving me a few minutes here and there to find the exact phrasing. But that’s a rare field and hasn’t been inundated with snake oil.
Would never trust it to diagnose a human condition or do my taxes nor trust the links it sent me to. So many hawkers with our without ai around that topic
So yeah, I think they should take some culpability on that and maybe they’d be forced to clean up their search engine as a result.