Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.
The ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google’s AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other sketchy business practices. After smearing publishers by making affirmative statements like “Yes, [it] is known for dubious business practices and is often perceived as a scam,” Google failed to correct the misleading output, even after the publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year.
Google tried the usual arguments to shield itself from liability for false statements in AI Overviews, such as arguing that most users understand that AI outputs aren’t always accurate and must be verified.
When does quality not matter?
Like, I guess you could ask it subjective things? Recipe ideas, art projects for kids, things where you can’t actually provide a wrong answer…
If you are just wanting to spam a bunch of copy over a network, quality wouldn’t matter. Say for example if you are running a propaganda campaign to undermine trust in the electoral system among American Conservatives quality does not matter. Just get the vibe right and spam out as much as you can.
Another obvious case is marketing. If you just need a bunch of Twitter accounts to say “B R A N D N A M E” over and over quality would not matter