[Swizec]

Good. The true mark of AGI is when a company accepts liability and doesn’t bury “for entertainment purposes only” deep in their TOS. Same as it works with employees.

Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger.

But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.

[andrewmutz]

I think it's a completely reasonable position that companies making self-driving cars and question/answer systems are legally liable for any errors.

But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country. AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits. Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.

[NitpickLawyer]

> AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits.

I doubt that will be the case, because of the long tail problem. (same with self driving cars and other ML related problems).

In fact, we have counter-examples today. Newspapers (even reputable ones) can't get it right every time, despite the fact that they have both trained people and in theory they're setup to catch that w/ reporters - fact checkers - editors. And still, from time to time, they get it wrong. (and I'm not talking about purposefully getting it wrong, just honest mistakes.)

What will likely happen with a ruling like this is that the answers will be hedged and legalesed and muddied up the wazoo.

[jojomodding]

Newspapers have mechanisms like corrections and apologies that can be used to "right" a published falsehoods.

This relies on me being able to find out if a newspaper lies about me, which is usually easy since we can all go buy the same newspaper. With AI it is much harder to find out that it has been telling potential customers wrong things about my business.

[naasking]

> Newspapers have mechanisms like corrections and apologies that can be used to "right" a published falsehoods.

Ineffective mechanisms. So if we accept ineffective mechanisms as sufficient redress in those spheres, why not here too?

[spwa4]

You don't realize how this works do you? One incredible power (executive) governments have is to let people get away with crimes. People don't realize they have this power, but they control the public prosecutor who can legally choose to do something ... or not.

You will find references to this in stories where the government lets people get away with murder, because of course, that's dramatic for a story.

But when "bigger interests" (ie. the Chancellor's bank accounts) are at play, just to name one example, China gets to distribute lead-painted children's toys in Germany and doesn't have to accept liability. Russia gets to import sanctioned natural gas over illegally constructed pipelines. Etc.

As to how this goes within the EU, in the worst (but common) case, is as follows: the government chooses a company, and refuse to sue them. They have a tendency to choose the worst possible company, like using Palantir for policing Germans [1]. Then you find out most of the Chancellor's grandchildren are working there.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/german-police-expands-use-of-palantir-...

[ozgrakkurt]

> AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits.

This doesn’t sound convincing. What AI and what company?

LLMs don’t seem like they will ever be reliable like that.

Self driving like waymo might be?

[MYEUHD]

> LLMs don’t seem like they will ever be reliable like that.

True. But you never know if / when there will be a new big breakthrough in AI, which will probably be based on a new architecture / paradigm, i.e. it won't be LLM-based

[jnovek]

LLMs will absolutely be like that. The speed this technology is moving at makes me certain, especially over a period of 10-20 years; 20 years ago I was bugging friends for a GMail invite and AI was a joke left to academics.

I think it will even be solved soon, like, within the next 18 to 36 months. Hallucinations are the biggest problem consumers have with LLMs and a solution to that would be instantly worth billions of dollars. I’m sure every company in this space is desperately trying to figure it out before everyone else.

A non-deterministic system will always make mistakes, but we’ll hit a target where LLMs make fewer mistakes than humans and that will be good enough for almost all applications.

[gilgamesh-OG]

I don't know if you can "fix" hallucinations without changing the fundamental architecture. The other factor in this article is that prior to the AI summary at the top, Google could simply state that it was an error on the part of the website owner. Now it is being held liable for whatever the summary states - even if it's more accurate, it can still be wrong enough times to be expensive.

[geon]

> I don't know if you can "fix" hallucinations without changing the fundamental architecture.

Exactly. "hallucinations" are not some special case. They are the LLM working as designed.

[jnovek]

They don’t need to be eliminated or “fixed”, they just need to be less frequent than human error.

[ozgrakkurt]

This is disregarding the entire mechanism by which LLMs work. How close to this ideal are the current frontier level ai is now? If you do a cost/improvement analysis does it look like it can reach a usable threshold?

I don’t know the numbers but as user, it seems impossible for it to be useful without expert review. It is also debatable if it brings any value when you consider the cost of building and using LLMs and the time of expert. Also need to include the opportunity cost the expert is spending on reviewing slop instead of creating work themselves and the long term consequences of this on the expert himself

[jnovek]

Hallucination rates go down by a few % with each new model generation, although some milestones have seen regression e.g. reasoning models are just overall worse. It is a bit hard to measure and compare across generations because the tests have to change in order to stay ahead of training data but they are generally improving. Check out HaluHard, it’s a stress test hallucination benchmark.

https://halluhard.com/

There will never be a time where there are zero hallucinations because of the non-determinist nature of LLMs, but eventually the frequency of hallucinations will be so low that it doesn’t matter. If the robot makes one mistake for every ten a human makes, that’s coming out ahead (depending on the nature of the mistake, of course).

Also I’m not making any value judgement about the technology and how it’s used and, frankly, I don’t really appreciate the assumption that I am. I’m fucking job hunting right now and it’s a hellscape thanks to LLMs.

I’m just being real about where the tech appears to be going based on its current trajectory and my experience in the industry. There seems to be a lot of cope going around that these things won’t ever be good enough to take our jobs. They will, and sooner than any of us are ready for. Leadership is fine with slop as long as it ships, the tech as it stands today doesn’t have to be much better to reach that standard.

[NicuCalcea]

Who would argue for offering self-driving cars before they're ready and safe? As a cyclist and pedestrian, of course I don't want them in my country if nobody's going to be liable when they run me over. Let them work out the kinks on Americans since they're so eager to be on the cutting edge of progress.

[Swizec]

> Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.

Correct, most jurisdictions do not allow businesses which cannot be held liable for their actions. This is pretty core to a modern society.

Imagine if a company selling Knicks tickets was not expected to then actually provide said tickets and there was simply nothing you could do about it. Oopsies our sales page is for entertainment purposes only

To be fair, the internet has spent some 30 years figuring out how this works and it’s still not fully resolved. For the most part we’ve agreed that companies must follow the laws of both where they live and where they operate. This wasn’t always obvious!

[scottyah]

Almost all jurisdictions allow businesses which cannot be held liable for all their actions. Imagine losing you house because someone decided to smother themselves in your infused cooking oil and light themselves on fire.

Businesses are made to make it easier to share profits and responsibilities when trying to fulfill users wants. Laws are made to offer protections for consumers (because nobody has time for common sense), but at the end of the day the consumer has to take responsibility or no products can be made. If you're too fat for a chair, it's on you to find or make one that works- not every product is for every person. Laws only stop chairs being sold that are too dangerous for anyone.

[autoexec]

> Almost all jurisdictions allow businesses which cannot be held liable for all their actions. Imagine losing you house because someone decided to smother themselves in your infused cooking oil and light themselves on fire.

How would that be the company's action? The only way the business might be liable is if they advertised their product as safe to use when lighting yourself on fire or if there was already some law that required them to warn customers not to light themselves on fire while using the product and they ignored that law.

In this case, it's not about what somebody else did. It's what Google did. There were already laws against lying about companies by saying they did illegal things when they didn't, google broke the law, so that's what google got in trouble for.

Consumer protection laws aren't there to replace common sense, they're there to prevent things like outright fraud and poisonings/murder.

[kiviuq]

I see an economic and social problem:

Freedom as in freedom of private property can only be guaranteed by the State. The State watches over its own population and makes sure that private property, i.e. capital and work, is made productive, so people go to work, businesses make profits, and everybody pays taxes. Taxes are the State's prime source of income.

When all these million of private interests collide, which they are bound to do, the State provides a jurisdictional system that has to decide between those private interests and the State's own interests.

E.g.: If a business owner refuses access to medical patents or to lower prices and safe potentially people's lives, the State has to decide between that immediate interest and its own interests, which is protecting private capital, as its source of income. Since I'm in Germany: In the emission scandal Volkswagen didn't just physically harm people, VW violated the private property of millions of customers. Despite that, the German State sided with Volkswagen the larger capital and did nothing. During Corona, the German State refused to open patents for a limited time to help safe people's lives in poor countries. Doing so would've violated the interest of private capital, so it refused. In contrast, if I as an individual refuse to help somebody in an emergency, the State would either fine me or put me in jail. In this case, people's lives become the State's prime interests, because they are also the State's source of income, as a productive workforce.

[chias]

Sounds like a win win to me

[gblargg]

To remove the choice from responsible people who can understand that LLM answers are not to be trusted with anything important?

[sham1]

If our standard for laws would be that "well no reasonable person would do this/believe this" then nothing would be illegal, there'd be no need to label any product as potentiality harmful, etc.

Do you really want to go there? That everything in the world would have a literal "caveat emptor" attached to it?

[gblargg]

I thought Google labeled its AI summary with a disclaimer already. I don't want companies to be forced to only offer safe-for-children services.

[bergen]

And the european consumer doesn't want harmful products to be beta tested on the public.

[9dev]

It's unbelievable how lightly some people hand over the tools for mass manipulation to a single corporation in the name of freedom of all things. We're not talking about a laser pointer here.

[sham1]

There is a disclaimer, yes, but you have to admit that it's pretty shit, innit? I mean for one, it's about the size of a human hair, and at least when I tried it, the disclaimer came up only when I clicked the "Show More" button. It might admittedly show up earlier if the response is shorter, admittedly I don't know. Also personally I'm a bit uneasy with the idea that just with a simple disclaimer they could avoid any and all liability. Not your argument, I know, but still.

As for not wanting to force companies to release only "safe-for-children products", I do actually agree. However I consider it to be a matter of degree, and in this case for example, I think that if nothing else, Google should say the very least make the disclaimer a bit more prominent and maybe tweak the model so that it's not quite as confident in its claims in the AI Overview.

[wsng]

The harm was not done to the readers of the AI generated response, but to the defamed companies.

And yes, it is ok to remove choice if the existence of that choice violates other person’s rights.

Google can continue offering that choice if they make sure nobody is defamed.

[bergen]

So we deploy a technology no one should trust to the general public, for what exact reason?

[autoexec]

So a very small number of people can get very rich off of the suffering of a massive number of other people I guess

[buellerbueller]

Venture Capital 101! Welcome to Y Combinator :)

[mrspuratic]

Land grab strategy 101.

[polotics]

Do you mean the responsible people who will ensure their algorithms can be trusted with the important task of acting in the best interest of said people? Try and get a defamatory statement about google from the AI search box.

[ndsipa_pomu]

There's plenty of examples of supposedly responsible people using LLM answers verbatim without any kind of overview by themselves e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/06/high-cour...

[phatfish]

I have to fight with my family members when they "Google" something, read the top AI slop result, and I ask which page it came from. They believe what is on the Google landing page, and actually I don't think that is a naive assumption. Google has pushed itself as the information oracle, now they are delivering slop as the first result. It's a bait and switch.

[circuit10]

I think they should just have to properly explain how AI tends to make things up when it doesn’t know, and that it’s good for coming up with ideas or suggesting directions for research but that you shouldn’t rely on it, because currently their advertising makes you think you can rely on it

The “AI can make mistakes” kind of disclaimers they hide in the corner don’t really cut it

[input_sh]

It's not even in the corner, it's completely hidden by default. You have to click on "show more" to expand the AI barf to see it.

[autoexec]

> But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country.

What sounds like a win to me. I certainly hope my country makes it dangerous for companies to break the law and/or harm the public with shitty products that aren't ready to be released legally/safely.

[hypfer]

> But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country.

Well.. I mean.. yeah? I don't think this is as bad as you think it is.

Have you looked at SV and its product offerings recently? It's mostly just enshittified gamified value extraction that doesn't respect the user at all.

"If you do not let us do all this the way we want, we will take away your ability to use our shit" hits different when the "shit" in that sentence is actually just "shit".

[ben_w]

I'm half-remembering a now-old satire along the same lines has Germans wondering why having Google Street View work in their area also requires internal photos of their apartments.

[TonyTrapp]

This one? :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMFBuHsKXb0

[ben_w]

Genau :)

[lelanthran]

> I think it's a completely reasonable position that companies making self-driving cars and question/answer systems are legally liable for any errors.

Well, for cars anyway, the manufacturer was always liable for the car doing something wrong (example: driver changes the volume on the radio, and that disables the brakes).

It's just that techbros want an exception to this rule if the car is self-driving.

I see no reason for an exception to this rule.

[kiicia]

why offer expensive service when it's effectively useless and only add to cost and amount of work? what else they offer, "summarize my text" and "generate custom emoji"? I can live without that...

for now only volvo accepts liability, and only for "slow crawl mode"

[intended]

Uh, yeah of course ?

Let someone else sacrifice the safety of their populace.

Heck - self driving is the fastest way to authoritarian government in practice. I’m surprised more people on HN haven’t cottoned on to that fact.

A self driving system will naturally build networks to share road state.

This network will eventually shift over to the government having the ability to manage how traffic should move during emergencies.

And at that point the government can easily decide where your car should go.

The inevitability of this outcome is blindingly obvious.

It’s highly beneficial to let other nations experiment and simply be followers.

[Forgeties79]

Plenty of products are legal in some countries and not in others.

[buellerbueller]

Perfectly acceptable to me.

[bloppe]

Most of the time, human beings driving cars with their own hands and eyeballs are not "liable" for their errors (unless they can be proven negligent or drunk), unless you count their insurance going up. Most car accidents do not end with anybody getting arrested, or sued, or anything like that. Insurance pays out, premiums go up, case closed.

If Waymo can be proven negligent or something, then sure, bleed em dry. But as long as they're acting in good faith and significantly reducing overall road fatalities per mile driven, I think it's actually pretty unreasonable to try to hold them to such a high standard you end up subjecting society to more of the higher fatality rates caused by humans.

[jameshart]

An at-fault driver’s insurance pays out because they are liable. Your insurance covers your liability. That’s why you need insurance.

[elil17]

> But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.

That would be a boon for Germany in my book. If you wanted AI results you could go use an AI.

[dbdr]

Agreed. The problem is that people are used to do search, which returns hits from clearly identified sources. Suddenly, Gemini is interpreting your query and generating its own response. It's an entirely different product. If I expect to find a source, this was just wasted inference. It's especially problematic that the LLM result is the top result, since we all know how much that matters.

It's fine to have Gemini as an option, it's also fine to have a combined result page, that should just be something people are able to chose if they want that (even persistently if they want). It should just not be the default.

[input_sh]

That's something that would make me always VPN into Germany for sure.

When I search, I want to see search results. When I ask AI, I want to ask AI. Combining the two into one is a disaster.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger

Mercedes-Benz does this in limited cases. Waymo does it generally. (In China, Level 4 and 5 transfers risk to the manufacturer. This is the correct way to do it.)

[michaellee8]

That's not exactly the case in China, the current state of FSD is still pretty dumb, unless you consider transferring control back to the user at the very last minute before it crashes a proper way to handle risks.

[JumpCrisscross]

Huh, have any good sources on self-driving liability in China? I’m beginning to suspect mine are biased.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> unless you consider transferring control back to the user at the very last minute before it crashes a proper way to handle risks

I don't think Tesla is based in China

[michaellee8]

I guess some Tesla are manufactured in China lol. I am just trying to say that the liability that Chinese manufacturers takes aren't more than the US ones.

[sva_]

It doesn't "bury [it] deep in their TOS", it says right under the box:

> AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses

[happymellon]

They decided to hijack search and rewrite other peoples websites as their own.

If they want to claim ownership, then they will have to accept responsibility.

[Rekindle8090]

Search still works the same you just have to scroll down

[happymellon]

So search doesn't still work the same.

[ychnd]

"Just".

I.e. not shown by default.

[quentindanjou]

Imagine going to a restaurant and when you pass your order "passing an order means accepting that there might be some poison in the food so double check before eating, good luck!"

[Dylan16807]

Why would that mean AGI? You can get into liability-accepting territory by restricting scope, a lot easier than by making your AI smarter.

Self-driving cars don't need to be particularly good for companies to make models where they accept liability in some circumstances, and the cars refuse to drive in other circumstances.

[wombatpm]

Wasn’t Tesla found to have FSD disengaging just before a crash so that the driver would be at fault?

[Dylan16807]

No. Sometimes it does disengage because things are going wrong, but those incidents are still reported the same as if it stayed engaged.

I found one time Musk was using a few seconds of disengagement to insult a driver, but it still would have counted as an FSD crash by Tesla's statistics.

[themafia]

> But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.

Time to set my VPN location to Germany. I'm tired of the "udm" trick.

[bmacho]

How is it tiring to set up

https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s

in your address bar once?

[cwnyth]

Yeah, I fail to see a down side to this. Those overviews are less than worthless to me.

[phorkyas82]

That'd be so great. No more cursing if I forgot the "-ai" or "-ki" flag in my search and see this odious AI overview processing window rendering slowly and taking up the space where my search results should be.

[beezlewax]

Ai results that nobody wanted in the first place?

[wisty]

Banning all technology because someone might misuse it is an illogical extreme.

As far as I can tell the ruling is more nuanced. If AI is defaming you, there needs to be a way to correct the record.

A company being open to liability does not mean it is always liable, just that it can be if it really messes up (especially if there are aggravating circumstances, e.g. you need to drag them to court to issue a correction).

[ndsipa_pomu]

However, banning a technology because it produces dangerous misinformation (e.g. showing inaccurate and dangerous results for a liver function test) sounds like a completely sane thing to do.

[aleph_minus_one]

> The true mark of AGI is when a company accepts liability and doesn’t bury “for entertainment purposes only” deep in their TOS.

I don't think so. It is easy to imagine the following (currently only fictional) scenario: the AGI does give perfectly correct answers (in a suitable sense), but some people in power consider these answers to be too dangerous, so they sue the company behind the AGI on terms of liability (i.e. the company is liable if the AGI gives answers that those in power don't like and which these people consider to be too dangerous for the public to know).

[3form]

This doesn't disagree with the poster above: they're saying that taking liability is a sign of belief in AGI. You're saying that lack of liability doesn't mean there's no AGI. Logically these two are not exclusive. p => q doesn't mean q => p.

[majewsky]

If the system cannot adjust its answers to the role it's currently serving, then it would evidently be significantly less intelligent than a human.

[aleph_minus_one]

> If the system cannot adjust its answers to the role it's currently serving, then it would evidently be significantly less intelligent than a human.

Or the system is very smart and recognizes the insanely deep "logical gaps" in the rules of the role that it is to serve.

[ryukoposting]

Well then you're going to be waiting a long, long time for AGI, friend. None of these companies have any incentive to ever remove that line, even if their chatbots are perfectly accurate over a large sample size. It's pure CYA. Unless it can be proven that the chatbot will always be perfectly accurate (which is not possible), the "entertainment purposes only" line will remain.

[pojntfx]

> But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.

Oh no! Anyway ...

[MichaelZuo]

Nearly the entire American tech industry has been super heavily selected for people who undervalue the legal language with crazy implications buried everywhere.

Otherwise most of it would not even exist.

Everyone would have continued paying out the nose to the IBM’s of the world year after year (who had unusual willingness to sign short ambiguously worded custom contracts to their own disadvantage, if paid vast amounts of money).

And be on mainframes to this very day… maybe Y combinator and HN wouldnt even exist in that world.

[eqvinox]

> Nearly the entire American tech industry has been super heavily selected for people who undervalue the legal language with crazy implications buried everywhere.

A lot of people in IT seem to think law and contracts are in a sense mathematical. They aren't; they're more like a high school book report - to be interpreted, as objectively as possible, but definitely also establishing the intent behind the letters.

Particularly contracts - no, you can't trick your way into things in most cases. "Surprising" clauses are invalid in most legal systems, in particular if one party to the contract is a layperson.

[MichaelZuo]

> "Surprising" clauses are invalid in most legal systems…

Yes, except… very notably… the USA… (especially certain parts such as Delaware). Which has a judiciary that entertain such clauses much more often than pretty much any other country I’ve heard of.

A clause like: “you agree to deliver your first born son on demand” buried in page 15 would indeed be laughed out of the courtroom.

But less severe clauses buried in page 15 might not be immediately laughed out. Causing a lot of expense and heartache before it gets dismissed.

Just think about it, if it were really just a total joke… why would large firms (FAANG, etc.) with serious legal departments want to look like clowns producing gibberish, year after year?

[Terr_]

I sometimes wonder how much blame should be placed at the feet of cartoons which teach viewers that invisibly-small print is legally binding, and that any term is enforceable.

I mean, it's not like most people have any kind of curriculum to fix those early assumptions.

[TalkingCodeMonk]

That is a false dichotomy. The solution to failed laws and regulations is not crime and corruption. The solution is to hold the policial and business leadership accountable; to fix the laws and regulations.

The entire American tech industry has exported Americas predatory, parasitic, and unethical consumer laws (the majority of which are ghost written by the wealthy and corporate legal teams). When I studied law in school decades ago, tactics like bait-and-switch, false advertisting, intentionally misleading or deceptive practices etc to sell products or contracts were illegal across the developed world.

Those illegal, anti-consumer tactics were the SOP of every tech startup I can think of from the early 2000's onwards; following the same route of initially offering a compelling feature set to attract and entice users – usually for free – until securing a certain number of users or funding, then changing the value proposition to exploit that user base, and extract as much wealth from them as possible, ad infinitum.

Today these tactics are known as enshittification, and the average American pseudo-libertarian software engineer will say this is fine, but that's what every anti-consumer parasite and criminal has said in history. Lying, misleading, and exploiting people for financial gain is fundamentally immoral, corrupt, and sociopathic, therefore it should be illegal. Just because it's the norm, or a digital product, you wrote that in the T&C's, or your doing everything behind the liability shield of an LLC, doesn't change that.

What ever happened to the concept of building a valuable, quality product and stable returns for generations? Working to improve the quality of life and standard of living of the community? Of the world? I feel like a 1950's traditional conservative when I suggest that, but most Americans are so heavily indoctrinated with corporate greed and sociopathy they'd consider that sentiment radical leftist extremism. I'm an athiest, but ya'll need jesus (the real brown socialist one). Many would argue Americas current institutional collapse is the natural result of this systemic corruption.

[ElProlactin]

> I feel like a 1950's traditional conservative when I suggest that...

I wouldn't argue that America's moral standards haven't declined (significantly) but I also think it's a romanization to suggest that 1950s America was the pinnacle of morality.

Lying, misleading, and exploiting people for financial gain has been a part of the fabric of American society since the country was founded.

If we're being honest, humans everywhere have demonstrated a high capacity for this behavior since the dawn of civilization.

[TalkingCodeMonk]

I never implied the 1950's was the pinnacle of morality. I was referencing the tropes that "traditional" "conservative" politicians since Reagan have consistently virtue signaled, while they aggressively worked to achieve the exact opposite.

There is evidence of that being a common 50's perspective though. It was when most conservatives and liberals alike had been burned by the greed of the guilded age, stock market collapse, great depression, and world war. The majority of the working class in the developed world were experiencing significant gains in QoL/SoL thanks to labour movements and aggressive unionization, did not view CEO's as admirable heroes, or fellow consumers and workers with malice and contempt. Hard work actually resulted in financial security, and greater opportunity for your children.

[ElProlactin]

> Hard work actually resulted in financial security, and greater opportunity for your children.

The economy of the 1950s was due to a variety of factors, including lack of international competition (European and Japanese industrial bases were devastated in the war), pent up consumer savings from war time, demographics (the baby boom), etc. Unionization was certainly a part of the mix but it seems you're cherry-picking to support your romanticized view.

And let's not forget: the 1950s were a good economic time if you were a white man. They weren't nearly so great if you were black or a woman.

[TalkingCodeMonk]

How is it a romanticization to assert what the entire history of global demographics and statistics support?

The distribution of work vs financial security was not uniform, but every developed economy had a greater distribution of wealth and stronger economic mobility in the 1950's than in the 1930's, or almost any time in human history. Every country not directly involved in cold/civil war improved in these factors from 1945 until the 80's, and that has continued in most of the developing world until today.

Do you believe black or indigenous populations were in a better position in 1930, or at any time during colonialism/imperialism, than they were in 1950? If you did, you would be wrong, and the only way to support it is by "cherry-picking" and "romanticization".

[jqpabc123]

But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.

But watch as Germany doesn't really mind losing blatant fabrication that mainly benefits Google.

Vendors keep ignoring the obvious --- that AI is a liability issue waiting to happen as evidence of it just keeps coming.

Otherwise would involve a fundamental overhaul of legal precedent to make lying acceptable.

[throwaway27448]

> The true mark of AGI

Can we just trash this as a marketing term? If/when AGI arrives there will be no point quibbling over competency. What we are looking at is just bad search results

[ben_w]

"No quibble" is more a mark of ASI than AGI; while both are easily coopted as marketing terms[0], "smarter than all humans" is harder to dispute than "general intelligence" (can do some graduate level work, can't drive well enough to render steering wheels obsolete, is it general?)

[0] e.g. Zuckerberg: https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/

[throwaway27448]

> "smarter than all humans" is harder to dispute

I don't think this is the case. It's not clear intelligence is a coherent concept to begin with, let alone a one-dimensional thing you can maximize. What, is it going to write stageplays that puts shakespeare to shame? Find a way to enforce world peace or end greed? I'm not at all convinced we anything more than the simple competency we expect from humans is possible. What would we look for to know it's there?

[ben_w]

> What, is it going to write stageplays that puts shakespeare to shame? Find a way to enforce world peace or end greed?

If it did, who would say "nope, still not super-intelligent"?

(I'm sure it's more than "nobody": the least realistic thing to me about my brother's LARP group was that nobody in that universe denied the gods it contained even though they'd immediately smite anyone who did that).

[throwaway27448]

> If it did, who would say "nope, still not super-intelligent"?

I'd be very happy to get better plays. I don't think we'll see this either, as this implies spending a lot on something with no return.

> (I'm sure it's more than "nobody": the least realistic thing to me about my brother's LARP group was that nobody in that universe denied the gods it contained even though they'd immediately smite anyone who did that).

That's sort of my point: judgement across history is inherently a messy process that entails consensus, which is anathema to a capital-driven world. Even the idea that there is a correct way to run society is very western and wouldn't pass earnest scrutiny. I strongly suspect that any sort of "super-intelligence" won't be useful to capital as it won't actually solve capital's problems—instead, it will reveal the contradictions inherent in a capitalist/western society and point strongly towards capital as the cancer that is crippling our planet. Hence, I don't think we will ever see it.

[cyanydeez]

you mean GAINS google search results, init

[SilverElfin]

Why is it good? Everyone with common sense knows AI can be wrong. And it’s not buried in their TOS. It’s in the chat box. But even if it wasn’t, it’s ridiculous to create liability for AI chatbots.

[jqpabc123]

it’s ridiculous to create liability for AI chatbots.

Liability isn't being *created* here, it has existed legally for a very long time.

False information can cause real harm --- and the legal burden of proof is on the source.

Search engines were provided legal exemption on the basis that they were simply quoting/referencing 3rd party sources who where legally liable for the content.

LLM chatbots legally exceed these bounds by fabricating info/content on their own ---data that does not exist elsewhere. This is a liability issue waiting to happen as there is no other responsible party/source to blame.

[WarmWash]

AI overviews cites it's sources though...

[jqpabc123]

Yes, AI would never list irrelevant sources and fabricate links.

https://blog.platinumids.com/blog/ai-hallucination-crisis-co...

[WarmWash]

AI overviews automatically produces links to it's sources for each statement, so it's trivial to check.

[jqpabc123]

so it's trivial to check.

It's trivial to use a search engine instead of AI. But people still use AI to save the time needed to read and check.

But in any case, none of this absolves slander. The legal burden of proof is still on the source --- which is AI.

[pesus]

And often still makes claims that completely contradict those sources it's "citing".

[ndsipa_pomu]

Common sense is so rare it might as well be a super power.

e.g. The failed marketing of A&W's third-pounder burger as so many people (in the USA) didn't believe that it was bigger than a quarter-pounder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger

[heathrow83829]

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 error, then the company could be sued millions of times per day.

down vote all you want, but I firmly believe this is an example where the user needs to use some judgement on the information they receive and have some critical thinking skills. google would be right to remove all AI results from germany.

[pdpi]

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.

[hunterpayne]

The other big point is that some people treat LLMs as if they are truth. We all know that they get a lot wrong, a lot of the time. Yesterday I watch both Elon post something somewhere between badly worded and wrong and another user used Grok to "prove him wrong", but this time being completely wrong in a different way. And this was a matter of law which can be looked up. Anything within throwing distance of politics won't be considered "correct" by everyone ever. Just defining "correct" is harder than it sounds and that probably isn't possible in reality.

[watwut]

I see people claiming LLM are trustworthy on HN all the time.

It is not just some people, it is a lot of people insode the tech itself pushing the "trustworthy" claim.

[sumeno]

Yeah, it would take me about 15 minutes to find several examples of people on HN claiming hallucinations are a solved problem

[Hugsbox]

We don't all know they get it wrong a lot. In fact, there's an overwhelming number of people who take it at face value

[michaellee8]

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]

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.

[thfuran]

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]

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]

But we agree that this was also wrong, right?

[account42]

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.

[drawfloat]

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?

[intended]

Just because someone got away with it means everyone should get away with it ?

[drstewart]

Exactly, it's like saying Wikipedia shouldn't be liable and immediately shut down for any wrong information shown on it.

[wasmitnetzen]

Wikipedia doesn't have to shut down, but they have to remove the libel.

The problem for LLMs is that they do not learn, and can't be prevented to produce that libel ever again. If Google finds a way to make that happen, no court would stop them from offering an LLM.

[thfuran]

The court isn’t stopping them from offering an LLM, it’s saying that serving the output of its LLM is, in this sense, equivalent to serving the output of a human writer they hired. That is, it is Google’s speech and they are directly liable for it, unlike when they’re just serving search results that are somebody else’s speech.

[em-bee]

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]

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.

[Gigachad]

If google didn't intend it's answers to be taken at face value it would just present the citations in a list of links rather than generating an answer.

Obviously the marketing point of the AI tools is it just gives you an answer straight up so you don't have to bother reading normal sources.

[SllX]

The AI summary is still useful for narrowing down the results, even if you fully check the citations.

> Obviously the marketing point of the AI tools is it just gives you an answer straight up so you don't have to bother reading normal sources.

To lazy people yes. That would be a marketing point. It’s not that though, so you use it to save time, but you don’t get to skip the verification step.

[Gigachad]

Google should not be publishing a statement that they haven't verified. This is different to listing search results links, they are the ones publishing the content here.

A journalist could not make up a harmful statement about someone and get away by saying the readers should have all read the sources. AI companies want to take all the benefits and profits, while holding none of the liability and responsibility for the harms they are causing.

[intended]

Absolutely not.

LLMs are, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of outsourced workers.

Google created a summary, not just sharing search results.

Google is responsible for the output it created and then published.

If they had only surfaced search results, then they would not be liable for what other people generated.

Google’s scale does not protect it from this liability.

[clort]

If you re-read the article, you might see that it mentions that the citations do not necessarily cover the AI summary. The linked pages do not make the claims that the AI summary makes. That is the context of the ruling. Google made up the claims, and provided false citations. They are not, in fact, providing a summary, but a whole new narrative. Therefore they own it.

[SllX]

I read the article and I’m aware of the failure modes of Google’s AI summary. They’re actually one of the worst in the space on this shit which is why I don’t use Gemini and it’s fine that they get slapped for this, but what I was responding to initially was this:

> 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.

Because if someone goes through the citations and it doesn’t substantiate what was generated, then what was generated was obviously bollocks. Being able to recognize those contradictions is an essential skill to using LLMs with web search at all. It’s not rocket science.

[danaris]

> Being able to recognize those contradictions is an essential skill

My eyes are brown.

I dislike coffee.

My phone is on the desk next to me right now.

One of these is false, and the other two are true. Can you recognise which is which? Or do you not have this "essential skill"?

When you're being given information about a topic you don't already know about, there's no skill to be able to recognise which pieces of that information are correct and which aren't. Either you know the information already, or you don't.

[em-bee]

nobody has that skill. in order to recognize a contradiction you have to already know something contradictory. if you don't then you can't recognize anything. the only other reason to make you check is that you are very suspicious of this AI thing. you and me are, but who else is? you can repeat a thousand times that people should not trust an AI summary and they will not get it. they have neither the motivation nor the energy to do that research.

it's like saying people should not use a computer if they don't know how to keep it secure.

you have to look at the reality, which is that people are not educated or critical enough to use AI safely. and that misinformation can cause people to get killed.

just yesterday there was a post about a man being falsely accused of a crime by AI tools and losing his job and his family as a consequence.

these mistakes destroy lives, and most people are far to trusting to use AI tools safely

[broken-kebab]

Important for whom exactly? If it's you who are called convicted pedo by Google AI summary, it's you who has vital interest in additional research but not me who reads it. There's intentions mismatch. Which probably would destroy your life, and you won't call it "entertainment" then, I think.

[SllX]

Strawmen are for scaring off the crows, not discussion fodder. Take it out to the farm where it belongs.

[broken-kebab]

Could you elaborate what in my thesis of intentions mismatch makes you think it is not a valid argument?

[oaiey]

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]

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]

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.

[gmerc]

So scale of harm creates immunity, is that the argument ?

[necovek]

Did we not already see that with the financial sector in 2008?

[intended]

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]

Too big to fail. Lol.

[Swizec]

> 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”

[globular-toast]

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.

[autoexec]

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.

[f33d5173]

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]

I guess we're all just temporarily confused FAANGs.

[f33d5173]

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]

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.

[thisisit]

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]

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.

[morkalork]

How do you feel about the EPA, industrial accidents, oil spills etc? Does scale give every company a free pass for damages?

[bulbar]

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)

[BigTTYGothGF]

> 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.

[account42]

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.

[Pay08]

Then Google can either discontinue their AI or make damn sure it's good.

[OtomotO]

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.

[silversmith]

Hang on, so you are arguing that responsibility for your product is just a phase you grow out of as a company?

[dabinat]

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?

[lynx97]

> 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.

[kevinxsun]

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.

[NegativeK]

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]

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]

> 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]

> 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.

[skeptic_ai]

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