The article says google will be fighting this, but I don't think they have a leg to stand by. Unless they want to be liable they will need to sanitize the data. But then we are just back to regular old search results.
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AI was telling other people's customers that we owned the other company at some point, so their customers were coming to us for support and telling us that we had to support them
And I'm constantly arguing with idiots who use AI.
Good
Give it to me as an option but do NOT make it the primary interface.
most users understand that AI outputs aren’t always accurate and must be verified.
So the point of the overview is what then? If you have to research to verify then why give info that most likely is false?
The court caught that too:
The court also seemed to take a dig at Google for expecting users not to “blindly trust” AI overviews, noting that the AI tool’s utility “would be significantly diminished if the ‘AI overview’ were generally regarded as unreliable and if every single displayed link required independent verification.”
ah, a shitpost defense
Luddite!! Don’t you understand that number go up??
To be fair, Google has lost a lot of business to ChatGPT & friends who are not offering a list of actual content associated with the search at all. Hate Google as much as you want and I'm sure most of it is warranted, but they're not completely evil in this case
"Their turd sandwich has vegetables in it" doesn't excuse the fact that they took the ham sandwich off the menu entirely.
i saw some sites have disclaimers saying ai outputs are for entertainment purposes only.
in line of goog's defense: "everybody (most users) knows that"
This is the value proposition of llms in general. They are great if you don't care about quality. They second quality matters their time-saving value drops off to near 0.
they drop into negatives. its hard to find valuable infprmation because ai written articles make it hard to find correct sources.
This isn't new since ChatGPT and friends dropped. For years before that, Google search results did limited interpretation of natural language requests, not just keyword match frequency. The SEO arms race drove a different kind of AI in search fetching for at least a decade before natural language chatbot tech hit the scene.
I don't know how much is intentional enshittification to make AI results look better vs how much is simple neglect of the SEO arms race vs maybe it's genuinely getting harder to deliver good simple search results with LLMs acting as SEO agents?
What I do know is: "AI Mode" delivers more useful information than the old style page link list does these days. The pages linked from the AI Mode results tend to be relevant and useful more than the top page of page links. Hallucinations are way down from where they were 2+ years ago, even better than "top results" misses used to be, IMO.
spoiler
"AI Mode" delivers more useful information than the old style page link list does these days.
How does Google's AI mode compare to other traditional (non-ai) search engines such as https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ ?
It could hypothetically help you direct your search by surfacing useful keywords or relevant events or names or something like it. But since they didn't make it do that, it's not really reliable for anything but an energy expensive way to remind yourself of things you already know (what was the command for X again)
remind yourself of things you already know (what was the command for X again)
Speak for yourself, they remind me of things I used to know. I have reached a point where I feel like I have forgotten more than most people know.
most likely is false?
I think the idea is that the info is probably true, but has high enough likelihood of being false that you better check anyway, if it's something that matters. There's a whole topic in machine learning called "probable approximate correctness" that tries to make that notion precise. Les Valiant's book of a similar title introduced the concept and looks very good. I have it but haven't read it yet.
A German publisher's article on the case: https://www.heise.de/en/news/LG-Munich-I-Google-ordered-to-pay-for-false-statements-in-AI-summaries-11327217.html
Because while conventional search results merely present indexed third-party content with title, snippet, and link, the AI function generates a coherent, flowing text that evaluates multiple sources and summarizes them into an independent answer. From the perspective of average users, this appears as direct information from Google, not as a mere forwarding of third-party content.
The previous, rather limited liability of search engines for third-party content is therefore not transferable to this generative format, the chamber ruled. Instead, the usual standards for defamation law apply: untrue factual claims can be prohibited without Google being able to hide behind the automated AI process. The note “created with AI” does not change the attribution to Google.
hopefully this goes through and all of the ai vc sink companies collapse and take their founders with them
I don't use Google, but in the other search engines I use, I occasionally use the AI thingy. Not for the AI overviews, but because usually, the AI shows better links than the normal search engine does.