A court in Munich declared that Google is liable for their "AI summaries" and all its hallucinations. This is an important step to bring "AI" slop in line with all other products on the market: "AI" products are basically the only ones where a provider can just deliver unchecked garbage and put all the liability on the consumer. I hope to see aggressive change here.
@tante I can't wait for this to apply to ai encouraging suicide or school shootings, or giving fake diagnoses, etc.
@tante according to that applicable law, I can't see how a different outcome would have been possible.
@tante the biggest german news show always starts with 'angaben ohne gewehr'.
google can do the same and legally just say: its information without guarantees or certainties.
@tante as far as I know, this is sort of incorrect, cause this ruling is just a local court
@tante I'll eat my hat if something actually comes of it.
So to speak
@tante virtually all of the modern ills of social media platforms can be fixed by just applying the pre-existing laws. Fraud is pretty much illegal everywhere, so is acting like a csam generator, facilitating terrorism, theft, etc.
Modern Western criminal courts have evolved to find and punish the poor, they exist in their own echo chambers of corruption where they lack the expertise, and the ability to challenge larger firms.
@tante the solution is on the way: fusion powered quantum ai. Invest now before everyone else does!
@tante
**A historical and necessary decision.** Holding companies accountable for AI "hallucinations" brings technology closer to the real world, where every product needs quality control and safety. Consumers shouldn't bear the burden of filtering out others' mistakes. Here's to responsible evolution!
🦁🦁🦁
Excellent verdict, actions have consequences…
Google's defence needs to be amplified by anyone talking to politicians about 'AI' regulation:
Google is explicitly saying in their legal filing that the outputs from their LLM should not be trusted and that users should know that.
That's one hell of an admission. Imagine saying that about any other category of product.
@david_chisnall @tante can you please point me to the exact wording? I need it for a workshop I'm preparing, thanks!
@david_chisnall
It’s fascinating what truths people suddenly find within themselves when lying has negative consequences. ;)
@david_chisnall @tante I would love for someone to hold them to actually proving that statement.
Do people?
Does the general public, in fact, treat LLM output as just statistically likely text, not real information?
All of their advertisement sure seems to be designed to ensure people *don’t*, and instead put all their trust in this machine garbage.
@david_chisnall @tante I remember years ago being on the Tube in London, and the it stopped, and the recommendation was "Please use other means to get to your destination". Which I felt was rather like saying "We cannot do our job, please find someone who can do our job of getting you there"
It feels a little like this.
@david_chisnall @tante bc on linux says "without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE." which my old school calculator (from 1970s that still works) does not...
As I've said elsewhere today:
There are strict legal limits on where you can limit liability. Your calculator can't have that disclaimer at all because (in both the EU and USA) there are very strict limits on disclaimers of liability for physical machines (which is an issue that comes up in open-source hardware quite often).
Even in software, claiming in your marketing that your product does one thing and then having a disclaimer in the license that says that it does not, in fact, do that thing is generally a problem: you may not be liable for the damages from failing to do the thing, but there's a good chance that you're liable for fraud. A disclaimer of liability isn't a get out of jail free card, it's a statement of intent.
@david_chisnall @tante once more, the law makes arbitrary distinctions. What if I grow a biological calculator? (which one can...)
@david_chisnall @tante that's the same defense Nigel Farage uses "I wasn't inciting a riot, I was just asking questions!". Although it seems by now he is so confident in the right-wing media barons who promot him that he even dispensed with the pretense of plausible deniability.
@david_chisnall @tante I see nothing shocking in that admission. AI abilities are jagged - in some areas exceptional (radiology) and in other prone to error. Like any human.
The key to judging its veracity is based on the strength of the citations it provides and what other sources are saying about the questions we ask of it.
@lymphomation @david_chisnall @tante
AI abilities are "jagged" because AI is an umbrella term for a bunch of disparate technologies and the AI used for radiology is almost entirely unrelated to the AI at issue here
@lymphomation @david_chisnall @tante
As for judging the veracity of LLM output based on its citations and what other sources say, by the time you've done that, you would've done better not to use an LLM at all - it would've been both less work and higher quality output
@david_chisnall Don't most software licences, particularly FOSS ones, say that?
No, they say that the product comes with no liabilities. That limitation of liability is not absolute and is restricted to the degree to which laws allow liability to be disclaimed. If you put something actively malicious in an open-source project, that license doesn't absolve you.
If you make explicit claims about the product, then a license saying 'actually, does not do the things that we claimed it can do' will not protect you against fraud claims.
I know a few people who won´t like this admission from Google: "the outputs from their LLM should not be trusted and users should know that" !!
Will OpenAI e.a. admit the same thing?
@david_chisnall @tante Don't forget that Copilot is for entertainment purposes only, too.
What's the difference between an LLM and a pack of cigarettes?
They both fill the room with smoke that will eventually kill someone. But cigarettes come with a warning.
@david_chisnall
Imagine TI saying that about their calculators.
@tante
iirc, Google said that earlier about their search results, also.
@tante This is the kind of thing I couldn't have come up with, because I would never have considered what the LLM is spitting out to be Google's words.
Guess there is no real way out. They get what they wanted and I isn't legally theft (however incompetent)... but now it's their words so guess they are responsible.
Look forward to how they try to fight this one. Sorry it's not our words, we actually stole the entirety of human creation.
Just wanted to look for my SPIEGEL pictures of Nazi Klar, pissed at a demo.
It was a short while ago after he was caught.
google answered that I am not a RAF terrorist.
Do I get compensation?
[de]
yeah, "helpful" was a month before when it showed me the image I searched for.
This search returned 0 results and 3 wrong connections ;)
