Ai and ml<\/p>\n
Hush. children, what\u2019s that sound? Has the flood gates\u2019 key been found?<\/p>\n
OPINION Tech companies hate liability, or at least the sort that makes them liable if something goes wrong. It doesn\u2019t much matter if what they ship is buggy, shabby or simply blows chunks, it\u2019s on you for using it. You fool. Corporates can get service level agreements to focus their suppliers\u2019 minds, and life-critical applications such as health or transport wire in liability through regulation, but shlubs like us get nothing.<\/p>\n
This goes double for LLMs, which lie to our face all day every day and twice on Sundays. It\u2019s on you to check. If you file a court brief with an hallucinated cite, or lose your production database to an insane agent, it\u2019s on, yes, you. Again. Terms and conditions. If the AI companies were liable for the things they ship they know are faulty, the industry would look very different.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Thus it is very interesting indeed that a Munich court has just found Google strictly liable for bad things that its own AI is doing<\/a> \u2014 in this case, making false and potentially very damaging statements about a couple of publishers. The AI Overview linked the publishers to various scams, in prime position at the top of the search results.\u00a0<\/p>\n Normally, search results don\u2019t make the search engine liable for what it digs up. These results weren\u2019t dug up, they were made up. Normally, if a page returned by a search engine contains legally actionable material, you can go after the page’s author. Here, there were no such pages. The author was Google\u2019s own AI. No escaping it, the court decided, someone had to be liable and that someone was Google.\u00a0<\/p>\n The company argued in its defense that because everyone knew you can\u2019t trust AI results, everyone knew to check what AI Overview told them. This worked as well as Alex Jones arguing that as he was a performance artist rather than a journalist<\/a>, the massive damage caused by his Infowars platform wasn\u2019t his responsibility. Don\u2019t blame me Pompei, said Vesuvius, I was just putting on a fireworks show. No sale. Google, you are guilty. Stop doing it.\u00a0<\/p>\n This may seem on its face to be nothing new, not different in principle to a lawyer abusing AI and eating judge boot. The difference is that the lawyer can either stop abusing AI or stop using it altogether. Google can do neither. It has bet the shop on an AI it can\u2019t control, one with a court-tested liability that can\u2019t be fixed until hallucinations and false equivalencies are fixed.\u00a0<\/p>\n