this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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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.

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[–] ThePantser@sh.itjust.works 122 points 2 days ago (15 children)

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?

[–] Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 54 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Luddite!! Don’t you understand that number go up??

[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

Not only that, they admitted that it is only "most" users that understand it's not accurate.

What about the rest? Just fuck em I guess? Let them eat poisonous mushrooms and wire their life savings away to a Nigerian prince.

[–] JollyG@lemmy.world 22 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] doctorflynt@feddit.org 21 points 2 days ago (2 children)

they drop into negatives. its hard to find valuable infprmation because ai written articles make it hard to find correct sources.

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[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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...

[–] JollyG@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

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

[–] ryper@lemmy.ca 17 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.”

[–] LaggyKar@programming.dev 5 points 1 day ago

Also, maybe this is just me, but in my experience the pages the Google AI overview links to as sources very often says nothing related to what the AI overview claims, which makes it very difficult to verify the information.

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 2 days ago

I work with a bunch of non tech yokels. They 100% for sure do not understand that AI answers must be checked and verified.

I can't wait till all this shit gets pay walled and 95% of people won't be using it. I don't really see Google being willing to just eat the losses on ai search queries forever.

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

And by making their user's initial impression one that might be wrong, they effectively poison people's thought processes as they sift through the rest of the actual results. Is that a better experience for the users?

And just to be absolutely clear, my understanding is that giving your users the best experience possible is what's going to result in retaining the most market share. Search is free, users will happily use a different search engine if a particular one doesn't work or annoys them.

So here's my conclusion: this method of using AI in search is not only frustrating for users, but also bad for Google. For the sake of their users, they should stop. For their own sake, they should stop.

[–] halfapage@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

ah, a shitpost defense

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I get the point and idea behind the existence of the "most people understand..." argument. A hot dog isn't actually made from dog. But when it comes to truth vs lies... if you aren't an entertainer, you just shouldn't be allowed to lie. And if you are an entertainer, it needs to be beyond obvious in you marketing and such that you are an entertainer. If you channel is called anything news, you are not an entertainer. Google search can be entertaining, but almost no one would say it is entertainment. So there is just no justification for it lieing with impunity.

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 71 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

Minor clarification - the article writer (not the ruling) said: "In other words, nobody needs AI to search the Internet."

The actual ruling was that a search provider is responsible if they inaccurately summarize results. When search results are just links to content related to a topic, the provider isn't responsible for the accuracy of the content, which is created by others. But they are responsible for their own summaries and other provider-created content.

[–] owsei@programming.dev 34 points 2 days ago (2 children)

When search results are just links to content related to a topic, the provider isn't responsible for the accuracy of the content, which is created by others.

Maybe google should try to make a service that just shows links to useful pages to answer the search requests.

[–] Darkenfolk@sh.itjust.works 18 points 2 days ago

Don't be ridiculous. what's next? Ownership of brought software instead of a License for use?

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

Like the Yellow Pages but for the internet!

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

When search results are just links to content related to a topic, the provider isn’t responsible for the accuracy of the content, which is created by others. But they are responsible for their own summaries and other provider-created content.

This is clearly a reasonable line to draw. This is not content created by others. It's your robot. Fix your shit.

Saying "I slapped a disclaimer on my libelous robot that says that it may generate libel" doesn't grant you the right to be libelous.

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Yeah it's not a landmark ruling by any means, it conforms to precedents and follows common sense. Content creators are responsible for what they create.

The clickbait headline tying the author's quote to the ruling was journalistically unprofessional - but headlines are usually written by editors not writers.

[–] kaitco@lemmy.world 27 points 2 days ago

Which is such an amazing detail, and really is the clincher.

They would have to revert their AI “answers” until they can deliver consistent accuracy on their answers. Which isn’t even a possibility with AI.

I hope someone brings this to the US as well.

[–] Deconceptualist@leminal.space 10 points 2 days ago

This is entirely reasonable and I hope this understanding catches on in courts worldwide.

If I go make my own summary/parody/spinoff/reaction video based on someone else's content, I'm responsible for the media I created. Simple as that. Same should apply to companies.

[–] ryper@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This is where the "nobody needs AI to search the internet" part comes from (emphasis mine):

Historically, any potentially harmful content surfaced by search engines has been protected from direct liability because that surfacing was considered largely unavoidable when helping users sort through an enormous tangle of information online. But the German court emphasized that AI search engines do not enjoy those same protections because AI summaries merely provide “an additional function—one without which the use of the search engine would still be (and is) possible, and without which users are perfectly capable of finding results amidst the ‘flood of data.’”

[–] binux@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago

Nobody needs to eat shit for nutrition, common sense says in ruling against shit peddlers

[–] Mulligrubs@lemmy.world 19 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I can't speak for everyone, but I know I certainly don't want anything AI in my search engine. I'll always switch to whoever provides that. It's only been around a short time, maybe it's the way things will be in the future and that's great and all, but I won't use it. I know I'm a dinosaur you win

[–] dr_robotBones@reddthat.com 5 points 2 days ago (5 children)
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[–] Eternal192@anarchist.nexus 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

We did fine for decades without AI and now just because they desperately need to make a profit from their pointless venture doesn't mean they can force me to use that garbage.

[–] Omgpwnies@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The government and media has spent those decades undermining education and vilifying "being smart". Of course they're champing at the bit now to insert an always-on personalized propaganda machine in place of that missing intelligence.

[–] auzy1@lemmy.world 29 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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

[–] Smoogs@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I've used it to search some techniques on simulations as all it does is link me to some developer pages saving me a few minutes here and there to find the exact phrasing. But that's a rare field and hasn't been inundated with snake oil.

Would never trust it to diagnose a human condition or do my taxes nor trust the links it sent me to. So many hawkers with our without ai around that topic

So yeah, I think they should take some culpability on that and maybe they'd be forced to clean up their search engine as a result.

[–] Omgpwnies@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

I'll trust the links if I trust the sites it's linking to. Any other links are viewed with skepticism at least initially until I've vetted the site in question.

[–] luciferofastora@feddit.org 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

That's really interesting. I've never really thought about it in this light, but a search engine's job is generally just to point you at a bunch of information that could be what your looking for. But they don't generate any content, so as a result they aren't really liable or in any way responsible for what you find, they aren't telling you anything.

But a generative AI, well those are very much their words, they don't have any link to hide behind, they are absolutely responsible for anything their AI tells you. This explicitly exposes them to legal risk in a way that they never were before.

I hope that in the rest of the world our courts can all make similar rulings. When people search for information you should not be allowed to generate something and provide them that answer as if it were a fact, without taking responsibility for it.

[–] luciferofastora@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago

as a result they aren't really liable or in any way responsible for what you find

One could make an argument that their ranking of results does make them partially responsible for the attention you give to particular sources, but there's no applicable legislation on that topic.

Good luck getting the fossils in our parliament to do something about that: By the time you've explained what it is, why it matters and start talking about the things that could or should be done, someone tells them that it's about maximising ad revenue and they'll immediately go "ah, so the free market will take care of it" and move on to more profitable matters.

This explicitly exposes them to legal risk in a way that they never were before.

I think the assumption was that the AI would be producing the words and thus implicitly bear the legal risk (but can't actually be held liable, which should tarpit the courts trying to figure out how to sue a non-person) and the "check the results" footnote should help shift the burden on the users, "caveat emptor" style.

This judge, at least, wasn't having any of it. If that legal risk wasn't explicit before, it is now.

Let's hope it sticks and spreads.

[–] aim4harmony@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

InternAIt 🤭

[–] kaotic@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Give it to me as an option but do NOT make it the primary interface.

[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Kagi? Add a "?" if you want to invoke summary, otherwise just get search

Works the same on DuckDuckGo for those who don't have a Kagi subscription!

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