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.
  • stickyprimer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    1 day ago

    91% accuracy is the kind of thing that may sound good… hey! It’s an A minus! But it’s actually completely, totally unacceptable. Imagine if the turn signal wand on your car operated with 91% accuracy. About one in every ten times it would light up the wrong direction. How many accidents are we causing? A lot.

    • mabeledo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      14 hours ago

      Even the number is a bit misleading. First of all, anyone who has ever done LLM benchmarking knows that this isn’t an exact science, at all. You can totally get a 99% on a benchmark and fail every single task on another.

      But even this particular claim is nuanced. From the original article:

      But with Gemini 3, Google’s A.I.-generated answers were more likely to be ungrounded than when the system was based on Gemini 2, meaning the websites they linked to did not completely support the information they provided. In October, correct answers were ungrounded 37 percent of the time. In February, with Gemini 3, that figure rose to 56 percent.

      See https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-overviews-accuracy.html

      Meaning that 56% of the time, users cannot even verify the information given by the LLM with the sources the LLM claims it’s using.

    • Impractical_Island@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      1 day ago

      This is why we should ban cars outright. Go back to writing on paper. I can stick a pen in my ass and make a cute drawing of a cat. In fact, I might be able to eat a cat and defecate it later, to make it more realistic. And that’s what we need to be; realistic.

      (This comment is about AI data centers)

      • Impractical_Island@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        1 day ago

        I make this “comment” every once and a while because I called someone out on how their post made little sense by parodying it, and now I just do this.

          • Impractical_Island@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            14 hours ago

            I’m drawing attention to my educational (f)art project while simultaneously goading someone who thought a less-hyperbolous but still nonsensical analogy was the greatest tweet anyone’s ever made. I mean, I remember the first time something I did got seen by millions, so I can understand their enthusiasm to defend it, at the same time, we’re still talking about AI data centers, right? I am, at least.

    • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      1 day ago

      Whether 91% accuracy is acceptable depends on how unacceptable the 9% inaccuracy is. If 91% of the information in your term paper is correct you’ll probably get a decent grade, but if you only kill 91% of cancer cells the surviving 9% will grow a treatment-resistant tumor and you’ll probably die. This makes percentages essentially useless - more important is how badly wrong the worst wrong result is.