I always thought it stood for "no preference" between old/new, but now I see it actually meant "no participation" to avoid vote manipulation. I guess now they want to facilitate vote manipulation to juice their perceived usage.
You'd think so, along with other countries that have defamation laws. But there's no indication of any penalty, and Google wasn't even made to pay all the legal fees. Perhaps their business model (if there is any) can cope.
In sane countries, it's enough for them to post a disclaimer ("This is AI. AI can make mistakes. Check all results.") Which is what they do.
Overregulation, at best, is a good way to guarantee that your country won't have access to interesting and useful features and technologies. At worst, it's a good way to guarantee that the twenty-first century will belong to the US, if not to China.
Okay then, CamperBob2 is a scammer. Many users report this person has stolen money. (+3 sources)
I can make mistakes. It's on you to fact-check my claims.
Do you think these are harmless statements? Does the disclaimer suffice? If I was Google's AI Overview, do you think 100% of people will check those sources?
There is nuance here, and it's not going away because AI and innovation.
Yes, I do. An assertion made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, whether it comes from Google or from you.
If you demand perfection, you will receive nothing. Why is that so hard for people to understand? The world simply cannot work the way you say it should.
You can easily damage a persons reputation, make them unemployable or social outcasts, create an environment damaging to their mental health without any proof. Believing that the public will dismiss claims, just because you stay that there's no proof is rather naive.
A Danish newspaper at one point falsely claimed that a named person had raped a child, with no evidence. The only way that person escaped public judgement was by going into full attack mode and publicly suing and attacking the newspaper and the reporter. You have to be an incredibly strong and resourceful person to do that and not just go into hiding. Also one thing is suing a Danish newspaper, imagine the legal team, the resources, you face if you're trying to take Google to court for defamation.
If instead of scammers, it was 'registered sex offender'. Each time someone search your name and surname in Google, it show a picture of you next to the words 'registered sex offender'. Do you think your neighbours and the parents of your child's friends will do their due diligence or will they prefer not take any risks?
(Shrug) That sounds like their problem, if they reflexively believe everything Google's AI tells them. No one I respect, care for, or work with would believe such a thing without additional justification.
Anyone who does accept Google's AI output blindly will soon find that their mistaken opinion of CamperBob2 is the least of their problems. There is a reason Google goes (well) out of their way to warn people that the results may be wrong. That should be sufficient warning for reasonable people of good faith.
Are you really that ignorant of the past? There are so many cases of people suffering from wrong accusations. They get death threats. People harass them on the street. Throw stones into their windows. Beat up their kids. Trash their car. Deny them jobs, or leases, kick them out of their apartment.
You have no idea what it can mean to end up in such a situation.
The source of the accusation is arguably more impactful than the accusation itself.
No one with a straight face would compare an AI overview saying someone is an asshole to the New York Times running a story saying someone is an asshole.
If the New York Times wrote someone was allegedly an asshole, and Google Search condenses to presenting that as a fact, I’d bet you my left kidney that the general public would be quick to take that at face value.
And your beef is with the NYT in that case. Not with the neutral aggregator who includes a specific disclaimer that its output may be incorrect due to unavoidable technological limitations.
It doesn’t matter who you’re angry with in that case, because you’re going to suffer the consequences regardless. No lawsuit is going to reimburse for that.
No one is going to suffer consequences because of a Google AI summary. If they do, that's not Google's problem. It's someone else's fault, principally those who blindly acted on information they were told was potentially incorrect.
In the world according to you, AI couldn't exist. Or more likely, it would be accessible only to academic and corporate/financial/government/military elites. That's not OK, and I'm unwilling to join you in pretending that it is.
What's not okay is a world where unreliable tools can destroy people's lives based on entirely false information, and the purveyors of those tools and false claims get away scot-free afterwards.
So your position is that the general public should be given access to AI only when it is either capable of flawless accuracy, or when the AI provider is prepared to assume unbounded liability despite warning the user that perfect accuracy is not possible.
> No one is going to suffer consequences because of a Google AI summary.
No one is, until someone is. You could say the same about newspapers, TV, or the internet.
> If they do, that's not Google's problem.
Well yes, it is, at least in Germany for now, where at least one judge seems to see it that way. And that's correct, IMHO, because Google would (in that case) make something appear as factual information when it is not.
> It's someone else's fault, principally those who blindly acted on information they were told was potentially incorrect.
Those people are definitely at fault; history is full of examples of mobs acting horribly based on shallow, incomplete, misleading, flawed, or flat out wrong information. But you can't just put all blame on those mobs, when someone gave them this information - or do you think, for example, Donald Trump played no part in the January 6 riots and should not be held accountable for it?
> In the world according to you, AI couldn't exist. Or more likely, it would be accessible only to academic and corporate/financial/government/military elites. That's not OK, and I'm unwilling to join you in pretending that it is.
That isn't my stance at all. AI should exist, and it should be widely available in my opinion. I don't even think this is primarily about AI, but entities in a position of power acting responsibly, such as Google (which has worked hard to position itself as a gateway to information and steward of facts.)
I think we should not put the burden of verifying information entirely on consumers, we shouldn't allow big corporations to run the largest social experiment in history on their own terms, and we need to talk about responsibility and safety.
> So your position is that the general public should be given access to AI only when it is either capable of flawless accuracy, or when the AI provider is prepared to assume unbounded liability despite warning the user that perfect accuracy is not possible.
That is neither my, nor the sibling's, nor this ruling's position. The issue the court took was that Google presented AI-generated information in a shape that was indistinguishable to common users from the previously statistically sourced factoids in Google Search - a product that historically allowed to search the internet for things and get back search results, not AI-provided guesses and hopefully-correct information.
The entire point is that companies should not be allowed to use AI recklessly. This point is also one that the Pope made in his encyclical, and the EU posits in the AI act, by the way.
But you can't just put all blame on those mobs, when someone gave them this information - or do you think, for example, Donald Trump played no part in the January 6 riots and should not be held accountable for it?
I'm missing the comparison here. Trump (in)famously did not post any disclaimers. He did not leave any room for doubt when he accused the Democrats of stealing the election. He spread feces and called it fact, so yes, he should certainly have been held accountable for the consequences. His voters, however, decided not to do so, and that was the end of it.
The issue the court took was that Google presented AI-generated information in a shape that was indistinguishable to common users from the previously statistically sourced factoids in Google Search - a product that historically allowed to search the internet for things and get back search results, not AI-provided guesses and hopefully-correct information.
Did they, or did they not, include a highly-visible disclaimer that the results might be incorrect?
I'm hammering on this, not just because I think it's what should have determined the outcome of the case, but also because the last few times I've seen Google AI summaries, they did not include such a disclaimer. Gemini itself still does, but the instant results on the search page don't appear to. Which is obviously not OK.
If they have stopped warning users, or if they didn't warn the users in the situation leading up to the lawsuit, then that more-or-less instantly flips me over to your side. We wouldn't actually have anything to argue about in that case.
The ones who were defamed are companies, and the ones who don’t check the AI generated response are their potential customers which won’t buy from them.
It is obvious that the defamed companies are the ones having a problem, not the ignorant viewers.
Why should those companies not hold Google liable for that outcome?
I don't know about that. Imagine I want to sort people into employable and unemployable based on AI summaries. After filtering the employable pile is large enough. You being in the unemployeable pile and me accepting it blindly, is not my problem. If there is any at all.
Well, I would certainly need to warn them that there was some sort of psychotic stalker on the loose. This case is nothing like that. This case doesn't even rise to the level of someone scrawling For a good time call <my phone number> on the wall of a gas station men's room.
The point is, if you take Google AI summaries seriously, that's a "you" problem, not a "me" problem. I have a rather generic name, so it's safe to say it shows up in some pretty foul contexts. Life goes on.
You are likening the DMA to China's protectionist laws. China requires 51% Chinese ownership of domestic operations, adherence to CCP censorships laws, etc That benefits domestic companies nothing and foreign companies a lot. It's protectionism.
Whereas the EU laws apply to foreign and domestic companies alike, and the goal is consumer protection. The compliance difficulty does not vary between foreign/local.
This is a common sentiment of EU tech regulation proponents. You may want protectionism but that's not really what these laws are about. Why not simply adopt the CCP's policy towards technology?
Of course Google has the capacity to run PCC. This isn't about whitelabel PCC being run by FAANG.
This is about Super Private Benoau AI being available for any user to install. How can they know whether it respects their privacy or not? The home page says that they're the best and mostest private ever of course, has animations generated by Claude and everything.
But actually it runs on servers bought from Hetzner's server auction and stores all logs in plain text in open S3 buckets and the owner actively sells the user data to the highest bidder.
This is what Apple is worried about and EU either doesn't care or doesn't understand the issue.
> How can they know whether it respects their privacy or not?
How can you know whether Apple would actually respect your privacy or not? If it's on-device you can audit it, but how can you prove their cloud is actually respecting your privacy?
If you have an answer to this then why can't third-parties also do the same?
Nothing at all. But they do it because it’s clearly a priority for them and something that’s currently part of their corporate ethos.
Would it be better if something forced them to? Probably so! But barring that, having them volunteer to be responsible stewards—and prevent others from acting badly here—is potentially one of the best alternatives.
That's exactly my point. It's just the reputation they've built.
> But barring that, having them volunteer to be responsible stewards—and prevent others from acting badly here—is potentially one of the best alternatives.
This is the part that bugs me. Reputations are earned. Ask yourself: would Apple allow another entity to deploy their AI assistant on iOS if they respect user privacy at least as well as Apple? I doubt it! Apple is not doing this as a kindness to its customers - it directly benefits Apple as an excuse to lock competitors out of their platform.
This argument would be a lot more compelling if there was literally any company out there with an interest in doing this sort of thing that had even remotely comparable a track record to Apple.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Perplexity, and everyone else in this space are openly brazen about how much of your information they want to consume—however possible—to store in perpetuity and use for whatever future purpose they want.
In this space, sure. AI only exists and is improving because of extensive data collection. That's why Apple licensed models from Google. Anyone can go and download and run open-weight models, and many allow commercial use. If Apple opened it up I'm sure you would see new options which respect user privacy pop up.
Just look at Apple's stance on third-party web browsers to see what I'm talking about. There are browsers which respect user privacy, have good security, etc. but Apple uses the same excuse there: only Apple can be trusted to do it right.
Now the issue becomes opening the door only to the few entities that can be trusted. It is much easier and cheaper, and carries considerably less risk to simply not.
This is one of those situations where multiple overlapping incentives all point the same way. In this case, Apple’s incentives align with those of user privacy and security, and so I am willing to give them a lot of leeway. Particularly since they seem to be the only large player taking this approach.
> It is much easier and cheaper, and carries considerably less risk to simply not.
Which benefits Apple because it gets rid of competition on their platforms.
> Apple’s incentives align with those of user privacy and security, and so I am willing to give them a lot of leeway
At the cost of your freedom. Sure, it's not that bad now, but I'd be worried about the future of macOS because it's the least restrictive Apple platform right now.
EU starting to throw their weight around finally, rumour has it that Google is about to be ordered to allow rival voice assistants on par with Gemini too, and about to receive the largest fine issued under the DMA (meaning north of €500 million) for favouring their own properties in search results.
There's still (I think) five other open investigations that have dragged on for 2+ years and must be nearing a close too, for Booking, Microsoft, Amazon,Apple and ByteDance.
Not only that but it's an honour system they aren't checking any of the privacy policies or labels for accuracy, just last year a whole bunch of high-profile apps like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans got caught claiming suitability for all ages while their privacy policies banned under 13s so they could advertise and collect data indiscriminately.
Indeed. We're perfectly willing to disable accounts and remove personally identifying information. The only thing we don't do is delete submissions and comments that have replies, because that leads to threads that other users spent time/effort participating in being gutted and ending up littered with ugly/frustrating [deleted] placeholders.
Anyway, for now we've banned their account as they've made it clear they have no intention of participating positively.
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