A local court in Germany has issued a ruling that could reshape the operation of search engines and artificial-intelligence-based chatbots worldwide. The Munich Regional Court preliminarily ruled that Google is liable for a series of false statements generated by its AI Overviews feature, requiring the company to prevent the dissemination of erroneous or inaccurate claims through its search engine.
The ruling stems from a case first reported by the Decoder, in which two publishers discovered that Google’s AI-generated summaries linked them, in certain searches, to questionable business practices, scams, and subscription-related frauds, without any basis for doing so.
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Earlier this year, the affected companies sent the tech giant a cease-and-desist letter, according to the report. Google denied liability, arguing that its automatic summary feature warns users that the information may contain errors and should be independently verified.
The court's analysis concluded that Google’s AI combined information corresponding to other companies that had been flagged for possible illicit practices with data from the plaintiffs, generating associations that did not appear in any of the sources linked by the search engine.
The authorities found that,...
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