A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previous limited liability protections for search engine operators don't apply to AI overviews. In this case, Google's AI had falsely linked two publishers to fraud and made claims that didn't appear in any of the linked sources. The ruling could set a precedent for AI-generated content liability worldwide.
I’m going to be straightforward with you and say that if someone doesn’t want to read documentation, they shouldn’t be doing the job the documentation is for.
I’ve been bitten by AI summarizing documentation so many times, these days I refuse to use it for that purpose anymore. It’s just not worth it. It creates a loop where it wants to try things that don’t work, walk back, try something else, repeat, and spend $10 worth of tokens in the process.
You say that I shouldn’t blindly trust AI like I shouldn’t blindly trust Google results. The difference is that AI is presented as an authoritative source in itself. Hell, most of the time LLMs don’t link sources unless explicitly asked for. And here’s the thing, if I have to go and read the actual sources, it isn’t doing anything significantly more time efficient than just text search, but it is doing it at ten times the cost.
That’s way too black and white. It’s a time and convenience thing. Let’s say i want to troubleshoot something on my motherboard that caused my pc to stop working. I really do not want to be reading through a 300 page manual from my phone (because my pc is not working). Search may turn up 10-20 relevant results that id have to scroll through.
And AI could take my query and do the work for me. Give me the link to the result they think is most relevant as well as explain it in more layman way than the manual.
I’m technical so I could do this without AI. But let’s take a less technical person. Now they can follow along and try as well.
The function is good. Its arguably the best path forward. The issue is accuracy and cost.
But something does not need to be accurate 100% of the time if we are all aware of it. If we wait for something to be 100% perfect nothing would ever progress.
And cost should only concern us on the environmental side. We should absolutely force them to fix that side of it. But price wise? Im really confused why the internet continues to bring up cost. I honestly dont care how much it costs a trillion dollar company to provide a service to us if I dont have to pay. Google, Youtube, Amazon, Netflix, all operated in the red for years and years. I don’t remember public discourse being omg how is Google going to afford to keep giving us nonshitty search.
The solution is text search. Has been for decades now. Search is good enough for these use cases, and proof of it is that nobody ever had to read a 300 page manual to fix such an issue.
Also, you know indexes exist, right?
If the issues are accuracy and cost, it means that it is a worse and less cost effective solution than just search. Unless you believe that LLMs can tell what’s true from what isn’t.
You really believe that these multi trillion companies don’t make a profit? That they offer their products for free? Such a naive take.