alt Hacker NewsGerman ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
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The irony of an article that makes a false claim about what Google was found liable for.... and that very few are fact checking it :)
The law they broke was a law protecting personal and business reputation against false statements of fact. Essentially no one can say I might be wrong, check yourself, but X is Y if that claim is essentially defamatory.
This is pretty good, I hope googles approach is to make sure they don't end up making statements of fact like they did and use more appropriate wording like according to X.... with direct disclaimer that they can't verify it. Even better that they look court documents to find any legal ruling and point people to that too.
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.
How could anything else make any sense? Platforms are getting used to provide dangerous broken products and get away with it. There should be some limit to it.
Next do Amazon that is selling AI generated foraging books: - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-...
When I was a kid it was possible to buy any foraging books from a store and they had a minimum quality. Is that so difficult to achieve? Is profiteering not punished anymore?
Their AI overviews are pretty commonly wrong, so this seems like it might hurt them a bit. Guessing they'll just block them in Germany or throw a bunch of disclaimers around the statements.
Link to the ruling (in German, obviously), since the page seems have to been hugged: https://the-decoder.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/26_O_869_2...
Choosing the answer for you rather than leaving it to the user is a tremendous power and the court correctly diagnoses it comes with responsibly to minimize harm to others in society.
This makes sense to me. AI is amazing tech, but it's being oversold to naive public, either on the back of hype, or cynically, knowing they can do it with inpunity, (I'm not sure which). HN users have a way better than average grasp of what AI is and we can be skeptical of results, the general public has no clue.
> In this case, Google's AI had wrongly linked two publishers to scams and shady business practices.
Guess that's the end of their AI overviews in the EU!
Good. This should be taken as the precedent for all economies: If you promulgate demonstrably false information to somebody's detriment then the owner and operator of the machine has to carry the liability.
I very much hope we don't see attempts to re-write T&C to avoid this liability.
I agree with the ruling, but this makes me wonder if it will be possible to have any AI agent at all if it's consistently applied.
After all, if I can get ChatGPT or Claude to say something false that should count too, right?
Companies generally are liable if their product doesn’t perform. No reason AI should be any different.
If companies can be held liable (in spite of very visible disclaimers, ToS, and usage policies) for the output of non-deterministic software, isn't this just a soft ban on the deployment of non-deterministic software?
Google generated those content, so Google should be liable to its own product, that's different from the third party links they just simply gathered and displayed, totally different things. If you are a victim too, reply below.
Curiously, if you look for "geramond verlag betrugsmasche", or "verlagshaus24 betrugsmasche", it will now tell you that
there are no indications it is a scam, but "significant organizational problems and extremely bad customer support lead to (list of bad experiences)".
I just tried Google search in Germany on my iPhone: AI results AND the disclaimer was behind a „show more“ button i.e. the may not be any disclaimer (and when shown it was in a small font).
Google generated those content, so Google should be liable to its own product, that's different from the third party links they just simply gathered and displayed, totally different things. I wonder how many victims are there now.
Anyone know if this ruling applies to answers generated by AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude?
All three have the ability to perform a web search, then compose a reply based on the search results. Pretty much the exact thing that Google AI Overview does. This ruling may make them liable for false answers.
What constitutes a correct answer though?
Is something like,
"People online say that x y and z because a b c"
a credible, correct answer, even if it isn't because of a/b/c?
Oh, I just found out that my Google search doesn't show AI summary anymore! I tried many search queries which typically will show an AI summary, but it only flicked on briefly then disappear entirely. Obviously, Google has reacted quickly on this ruling!
Maybe Google's models will start to suck less as a result. Excellent.
I have a business where our support email is recommended when people are searching for how to cancel a completely unrelated scam subscription that is showing up on their bank or credit card charges. We get emails almost daily from confused people.
Unless the courts here made the ruling incredibly narrow somehow (only referencing search engines maybe?), how does this not just ban AI in Germany overnight?
Every AI model can make something up sometimes. Over millions of daily calls, it's essentially impossible for the technology to be guaranteed correct 100% of the time.
I'm surprised this is even a thing. After all, you go to Google not for the truth, but to search Google. Since when is truthiness the "guarantee of service"?
You're not even paying for a google service, search is free... You might be the product, and your data, but you didn't directly pay for a service and they didn't sell you a fake service.
I'm not taking Google's side, this isn't about whether it's right or wrong to rob websites of traffic, this is about AI's returning search metadata.
But I'm surprised that they lost this argument, and the line they took in the first place.
The Internet isn't made of fact checked data, it's crowd sourced. How can anyone be liable?
Doesn't libel require to be deliberate? Ie you can't sue for libel if the author admits a mistake and corrects it?
Finally, a sensible ruling based in the interests of the public rather than expediency for corporations
Excellent. Even more so with the hostile orange man - Europeans really need to get going.
Just ban AI in search engine.
Overviews is not a good product idea and I think it was done for other deeper reasons. AI shouldn’t be pushed on people because AI can be high variance — it takes time to get adapted to this.
Some digital matters concern the state and others are private and there should be no sovereignty of the state over private matters.
Does this extend to ads displayed in search results? Because they absolutely should be liable for the scams they advertise also.
We should be teaching people to be cynical of AI answers.
Even if the answers are correct, they could still be biased, incomplete, misleading, and all the other media-literacy things people should be looking out for.
This ruling seems to go the opposite direction; 'I am legally obliged to give correct answers, so I am always right, trust the AI'.
I've found a fun and pretty reliable way to get Gemini to output incorrect information: Ask for a chapter by chapter summary of a book.
I first tried it to remind me of what happened in a previous book in a series that I was reading. When I realized it was either misstating plot points or straight up hallucinating, I tried it on a bunch more books to amuse myself.
Older classics are of course more accurate, but for newer or less popular books Gemini won't shy away from giving you a summary culled from misinterpreted Reddit threads and Goodreads reviews. It's like getting a secondhand account from someone who talked to another person who had read the book a long time ago. You get the general gist of it, but with some added flavor.
Even if you upload an entire epub of a book, the results aren't stellar. Rather than a Cliffs Note's quality summary, they're pretty sparse or leave out important bits of information. One chapter summary I got back made a point of describing what one of the characters was wearing, even though it had absolutely zero to do with anything else. Yes, that's technically a "summary", but not quite my tempo.
If Google wants to present summaries of websites in anything more than a very, very superficial description, they're going to have to improve their model's ability to understand context and importance. In theory, a novel is a self-contained bundle of text, so pulling accurate information out of it should be straight forward. A website is naturally going to be way more of a challenge.
All that said, I find the AI summaries from Google/Gemini to be quite useful and a time saver, but I know to always double check something if it's at all important.
Wow, you guys really think this is good?
Because of the same rules, German restaurants also get to pick and choose which reviews stay up. They can literally take down any specific reviews they like.
A restaurant that mostly gets 1 star reviews will still show up with 5 stars on Google maps, as they will simply delete the reviews with less than 5 stars as defamatory.
Here's a couple of examples:
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1peujau/google_rev...
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/18z4shs/legal_thre...
https://www.reddit.com/r/frankfurt/comments/1lox7ha/bad_revi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1iiaco8/restaurant...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskGermany/comments/1ha7sxf/why_do_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1t613w7/it_was_fin...
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1l98608/threatenin...
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1sw34jc/can_you_ge...
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1sw34jc/can_you_ge...
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/10kmn66/writing_an...
tl;dr Germans are particularly bad at coming up with reasonable rules to handle these situations
So stupid. What is this with making perfect the enemy of good. You can never guarantee the output of an LLM does that mean Germany does get to use them?
EU countries continuing to ensure the conditions for their future economic competitivity
[flagged]
Their digital sovereignty
If I get it correctly I like the ruling.
So Google has established a product called Search. For that product rules have been established. Google has monopolized that product.
Now Google is replacing that product with a new product. But they keep calling it the same thing. Because they want to keep their monopoly.
That is what has been deemed illegal. Gemini is not illegal. Pretending the worst version of Gemini is Search is illegal, because it breaks the rules established for Search.
But IANAL.