I'm surprised this is even a thing. After all, you go to Google not for the truth, but to search Google. Since when is truthiness the "guarantee of service"?

You're not even paying for a google service, search is free... You might be the product, and your data, but you didn't directly pay for a service and they didn't sell you a fake service.

I'm not taking Google's side, this isn't about whether it's right or wrong to rob websites of traffic, this is about AI's returning search metadata.

But I'm surprised that they lost this argument, and the line they took in the first place.

The Internet isn't made of fact checked data, it's crowd sourced. How can anyone be liable?

That is exactly the point of the ruling, though... they are saying that AI summaries are NOT the same as search. If Google was just returning search results, and then users clicked on a website and read the content there, Google is not responsible for the content.

If instead Google gives you an answer right there on google.com, without going to another site, they ARE responsible for it.

That makes sense to me?

That's the difference between returning search results and interpreting the information and summarising them. If a newspaper says 'so-and-so has been arrested for theft' it's not the same as them summarising to 'so-and-so is a thief', the second is potentially libel. Why should Google be held to a different standard?

The title is misleading IMO. It should say "German ruling declares Google liable for libel in AI Overviews"

I was prepared to say the same thing as you but after reading it seems totally fair.

The key difference is that this would be illegal if a human wrote it too.

Google itself is more trustworthy from a normal person perspective as they use it a lot.

None of "AI" companies call their apps "Entertainment fun text generator". They are call them serious names, use words like "intrllegence" and "thinking".

So yeah I'd think if any of "AIs" start to recommend to drink some bleach or take a flight from a 10th floor window these companies should be liable.

I think it's very clear that Google's AI overviews go far beyond just searching Google because they often incorrectly compile sources to come up with an incorrect answer. For example of this look at the comment I made in this thread

I go to Google to search, but get spammed as if I wanted to talk to a chatbot (and a very poor quality chatbot at that).

This is a gigantic own goal for Google. The average person’s impression is that Google AI is much worse than ChatGPT, even though that’s not actually the case. Google is shoving a terrible model in everyone’s faces.

The question is whether Google is publishing false claims or relaying other people’s false claims. The court found it to be the former which makes sense to me.

Playing the perception game wins you the perspective price.

Nothing is free. Google benefits off you when they show you search page. Either today (ads) or later