cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11979760
Google’s AI search told users that an Aachen doctor had been convicted of a sex crime. The conviction belonged to a different man, and on September 24 the Aachen Regional Court [in Germany] banned Google from repeating it, ruling that the company answers for what its AI Mode says. It is the second German court this year to treat Google’s AI answers as Google’s own words, and the first ruling to say so has now been settled rather than tested on appeal.
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The doctor asked Google to delete the text on August 28 and followed up with a formal legal warning on September 15. Neither worked. The court’s 8th civil chamber then acted without hearing Google first, citing the urgency of false claims that were “publicly visible” to an unlimited audience. Google Ireland, which runs Google Search in the EU, now faces a fine of up to €250,000 for each breach, or detention of its managers, if it repeats three versions of the text. Google can still challenge the order.
The court’s reasoning is blunt: Google “provides AI-generated search and is therefore also responsible for the answers generated in this context.” It added that checking would have been easy: had Google “confronted its own AI” with the doctor’s objections, it would have found the statements were false.
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That reasoning comes almost word for word from Munich. On May 28 the Munich Regional Court I ruled (case 26 O 869/26) on AI Overviews that told searchers two Munich publishing companies were “known for dubious business practices”, ran subscription traps and kept changing their names to avoid being traced. None of the linked sources said that; the first one cited did not mention the companies at all.
Google argued that it was only summarising other people’s pages, the same defence that has long protected search engines in Germany. The court disagreed. AI Overviews, it said, do not just show links but make “independent, new and substantive statements” built by evaluating and combining third-party sites, so Google must treat them as its own, including as the provider of an AI system under the EU’s AI Act. “Only it has influence over the AI,” the judges wrote.
Google said at the time it would appeal. That appeal has ended in a settlement, The Decoder reported on Saturday; the terms are not known and neither Google nor the publishers would comment. The upshot is that no higher court has ruled, so the Munich judgment is not binding precedent, but lower courts such as Aachen are already following it.
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The court’s reasoning is blunt: Google “provides AI-generated search and is therefore also responsible for the answers generated in this context.”
Yes. Easy. Shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.
If you’re using all the tricks in the trade to substitute your AI answer over actual results, in an obvious attempt at making people stop there and use that as their main source of information…
Yeah. You are 100% responsible for anything your glorified autocorrect spits out.
Go Germany, hoping every country in EU follows that example.
I’m hoping every EU takes it as inspiration and expands on it, not just follows.
The fines for this shit ought to exponentially increase daily, such that it becomes cheaper to unplug the AI completely within a week or so if they can’t make the libel stop.
Go Germany, hoping every country in EU follows that example.
As far as I understand, it has always been as it is now, and in addition, it is also explicit law (stating the obvious) for several years already (some EU act).
I feel like we’re living in crazy-land where no one gets tickets for the behavior of self-driving cars they created, and AI is allowed to spit out factually incorrect information in an authoritative wrapper, with no responsibility for the consequences.
Google Ireland, which runs Google Search in the EU, now faces a fine of up to €250,000 for each breach, or detention of its managers, if it repeats three versions of the text. [own emphasis]
Holy shit that judge isn’t fucking around.
€250,000 for each breach
Holy shit that judge isn’t fucking around.
The relatively high amount is related to the possible damage of the violation: some doctor’s whole work (including several other people working for him, I assume) was at risk by the false accusations made by google.
But the principle behind it is plain normal civil law, and it is available to anyone who’s rights have been violated: the violator gets ordered by court to stop it = never repeat the violation.
The detention thing is also quite normal, but it can happen only if they don’t pay the fine properly.
That’s about time. Fines for corporations don’t have any urgency as it’s not “their” money. The thought of ending up in jail is more personal.
Here is a fun game to try with your friends… flip the words of Company does X to random person does X … then see what punishments feel appropriate. Company X destroys the 10% of the amazon becomes Todd from work destroys… or Bob framed another person for sex crimes. Crazy how privileged companies are vs individuals.
So glad that judges do a little more than just playing fun games.
The “independent, new and substantive statements” framing is the part I think travels furthest. Google’s defense was basically “we’re just summarizing,” but a summary that recombines facts into a new claim — this doctor was convicted — is authorship in any meaningful sense, so the old search-engine safe-harbor logic doesn’t really apply. If that reading holds across the EU it gets interesting fast for every company bolting an AI chatbot onto their search or docs. It’d be cheaper to cite sources verbatim with links than to defend a generated claim in court, which honestly would also make the products better. Also notable this is the second German court to land on the same side this year — one ruling is an outlier, two starts looking like a direction.
It’s about time …
Google argued that it was only summarising other people’s pages, the same defence that has long protected search engines in Germany. The court disagreed. AI Overviews, it said, do not just show links but make “independent, new and substantive statements” built by evaluating and combining third-party sites, so Google must treat them as its own, including as the provider of an AI system under the EU’s AI Act. “Only it has influence over the AI,” the judges wrote.
It doesn’t summarize, to summarize something you first need to understand what it says and even what it means.
AI in it’s current form doesn’t understand the meaning of anything, just the statistical chance of what the next word should be.
Al it’s doing is paraphrasing, shuffling words around just enough to claim it doesn’t owe the original writer anything.
Most of us learned why that was unacceptable in jr high English; it’s plagiarism if done correctly and nonsense if not.
Google and other AI corps want to play it both ways, they want to reuse information for free while not being accountable for what it says. If they’re not accountable because it’s not their information, why aren’t they paying the people who created the information?
Whether it has any sort of real understanding or not, it does summarise. It produces summaries as well as many other things. It’s just very unreliable, due to a number of shortcomings that might just be fundamental: no real world model, no ability to distinguish between truth and lies, fact and fiction, except statistically, which sometimes results in nonsense. It can misrepresent, leave things out, and sometimes just make stuff up.
It does summarise, but it does it poorly and unreliably.
They are taking the internet everyone has built for 30+ years, putting it in a mixer, and selling the sludge back to us.
