AI don't trust techbros

Dekafox

Dekafox

Fabulously Foxy Dragon
Citizen
the-decoder.com

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previous limited liability protections for search engine operators don't apply to AI overviews. In this case, Google's AI had falsely linked two publishers to...
the-decoder.com the-decoder.com

Just a German regional court, and it hasn't gone through an appeal process yet. Hopefully other courts pick up on this.

Also a commentary I saw on this:

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) (@[email protected])

The interesting thing about the German court ruling against Google is not the verdict. The fact that, if you put libel on your web site, you are liable for it even if you used a machine to automatically generate libel, should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the law at any point in...
infosec.exchange infosec.exchange
The interesting thing about the German court ruling against Google is not the verdict. The fact that, if you put libel on your web site, you are liable for it even if you used a machine to automatically generate libel, should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the law at any point in the last century or so: humans have agency, the tools that they use do not shield them from liability, no matter how obfuscating they are.

The bit I suspect will have much more impact longer term is one of the defences entered by Google's lawyers. Somewhat more verbose in the original German, but it boiled down to: Everyone knows LLMs produce nonsense, no one should ever trust the output of an LLM in any situation that matters, it's not Google's fault if people read the output of an LLM and believed it might have some connection to reality.

It's debatable whether everyone knows that, but this is now an official statement entered into the court record that at least one of the major LLM vendors knows this. And that's now an on-the-record statement made under penalty of perjury that can be entered as evidence in any court case against companies selling LLM-integrated tooling.

I suspect that this will show up in a lot of court cases over the next few years and probably have a much bigger long-term impact than the ruling. Any claim about utility made by vendors of 'AI' tools is now open to lawsuits ranging from misleading advertising to outright fraud as a result of this.

Google would probably have been much better advised to settle the case rather than enter that claim as evidence. Imagine if a car manufacturer had entered a defence against liability in case of a collision by saying 'everyone knows automobiles are impossible to operate safely on the roads and anyone who buys one should know better than to take it on the public highway'. Google's lawyers have just done the equivalent for the 'AI' industry.
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wonko the sane?

wonko the sane?

You may test that assumption at your convinience.
Citizen
Christ, even the chatbots want to divorce from society and live a quiet life on the coast.
 
CoffeeHorse

CoffeeHorse

Hanging in there
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Council of Elders
Citizen
2065138044743610681.png
 
CoffeeHorse

CoffeeHorse

Hanging in there
Staff member
Council of Elders
Citizen
AI is going to kill tech support forums. It just talked me through another one of my bizarro computer problems. Not once did it tell me to download some tool and post logs. Not once did it tell me to run some Powershell command without explaining why. It was awesome.
 
Dekafox

Dekafox

Fabulously Foxy Dragon
Citizen

AI Use by the US Government - Schneier on Security

On 14 April, the Trump administration quietly acknowledged the widespread use of AI to automate government processes. The office of management and budget (OMB) disclosed a staggering 3,611 active or planned use cases for AI across the federal government. The list has ballooned by 70% from the...
www.schneier.com www.schneier.com
 
Dekafox

Dekafox

Fabulously Foxy Dragon
Citizen
www.404media.co

The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI

Leaked audio from Accenture says a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentation slides.
www.404media.co www.404media.co

tl;dr companies required people to use AI, then went all shocked pikachu when nontechnical workers burn through their entire token budget turning PDFs into powerpoints now that they're getting charged on actual usage instead of blanket subscriptions.
 
Pocket

Pocket

jumbled pile of person
Citizen
Yeah, except they'll find a way to make it our problem and not theirs, just like everything else that's ever gone wrong for them.
 
CoffeeHorse

CoffeeHorse

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Council of Elders
Citizen
Good. Just say no.

I do still feed the beast, but I'm only using it for tech support, and mostly 1970s-1980s tech support. Nothing generative, and nothing anyone these days would be paid to do. Just stupid jive that doesn't have a support forum or a subreddit. I go "What does this button do? I found the manual but this feature is not in there." and it goes "Yeah that feature was added too late to make it into the manual, but it was described in some developer documentation a few months later. The only online copy is in Finnish but I can translate it for you."

I don't know. This jive does have a use, but it's a useless use that nobody but me would care about, but it does work.
 
CoffeeHorse

CoffeeHorse

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Citizen
BAHAHAHA I just experienced one of those meltdowns researchers keep talking about. It's real.

I just got an unsolicited call from an AI. I will say its speech recognition blew away yesteryear's robocallers. It recognized every word I said and didn't just search for the closest fit in a small menu of scripted responses. It could actually talk.

But holy jive this bot could not do things. It abruptly tried to transfer me to a human without mentioning it was about to do that or who I would be talking to or why. Just out of nowhere the phone started going beep beep beep. I didn't know what was happening until the AI came back and said the person it was trying to transfer me to wasn't picking up. Having failed in its task, and not knowing the concept of just trying again, it panicked and hung up on me.
 
Stepwise

Stepwise

...even Team Whirl.
Citizen
I remember getting a robocall thing to go in circles once, but your story beats mine. "we're sorry, our AI agent has left the call and is currently sitting in the corner breathing into a paper bag . . . "
 
CoffeeHorse

CoffeeHorse

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I'm kinda glad this experiment is happening. I hope labor activists are taking notes, because the consistent way every AI trying to do our jobs ends up having panic attacks is building an interesting case that there must be something objectively wrong with work today. Their mental health (or whatever we can call it) almost immediately becomes as bad as ours.
 
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