Google’s AI search told users that an Aachen doctor had been convicted of a sex crime. The conviction belonged to a different man, and on September 24 the Aachen Regional Court [in Germany] banned Google from repeating it, ruling that the company answers for what its AI Mode says. It is the second German court this year to treat Google’s AI answers as Google’s own words, and the first ruling to say so has now been settled rather than tested on appeal.
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The doctor asked Google to delete the text on August 28 and followed up with a formal legal warning on September 15. Neither worked. The court’s 8th civil chamber then acted without hearing Google first, citing the urgency of false claims that were “publicly visible” to an unlimited audience. Google Ireland, which runs Google Search in the EU, now faces a fine of up to €250,000 for each breach, or detention of its managers, if it repeats three versions of the text. Google can still challenge the order.
The court’s reasoning is blunt: Google “provides AI-generated search and is therefore also responsible for the answers generated in this context.” It added that checking would have been easy: had Google “confronted its own AI” with the doctor’s objections, it would have found the statements were false.
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That reasoning comes almost word for word from Munich. On May 28 the Munich Regional Court I ruled (case 26 O 869/26) on AI Overviews that told searchers two Munich publishing companies were “known for dubious business practices”, ran subscription traps and kept changing their names to avoid being traced. None of the linked sources said that; the first one cited did not mention the companies at all.
Google argued that it was only summarising other people’s pages, the same defence that has long protected search engines in Germany. The court disagreed. AI Overviews, it said, do not just show links but make “independent, new and substantive statements” built by evaluating and combining third-party sites, so Google must treat them as its own, including as the provider of an AI system under the EU’s AI Act. “Only it has influence over the AI,” the judges wrote.
Google said at the time it would appeal. That appeal has ended in a settlement, The Decoder reported on Saturday; the terms are not known and neither Google nor the publishers would comment. The upshot is that no higher court has ruled, so the Munich judgment is not binding precedent, but lower courts such as Aachen are already following it.
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Why is anyone listening to AI? We were told not to use Wikipedia for reports…wtf
I mean, I have to say, recently Qwant introduced default-on AI responses and one reason I hate it, is that it shows up where they also show excerpts from Wikipedia etc… It has happened to me that I was reading the generated text thinking it’s an excerpt.
I would not be surprised, if tons of users never realize that it’s generated.
I fully agree, but the thing here is this doctor who was accused of a sex crime he didn’t commit. They can’t simply throw out a chatbot without a human being to be held accountable. This is one of the major threats of LLMs in my opinion: the danger isn’t the LLM itself, but its creator’s attempt to reject any human responsibility.
Its the same as the SaaS revolution. The accountability is outsourced and everyone can just shrug. Same as police violence. Homeless camp gets disrupted and now there is a flower patch…huh. If no one is responsible, than no one has to be responsible.
Maybe I am immune to responsibility and I just haven’t tried it out yet.
I don’t consider that even a threat of LLMs, just humans being human.
Just like we don’t blame video games for violence.
Deny justice long enough and you shouldn’t be surprised when the people extract their own form in the worst way possible.
Yeah maybe in 2003.
Yeah, pretty much that exact window. Before that it was dont trust ANYTHING on the internet.
Don’t trust anything on the internet should have really never gone away.
“Let me google that” no longer is actually searching for an actual article sadly (even if only the 1st), but just parroting whatever its LLM vomits out.
Because wikipedia was never backed by billionaires owning virtually everything
If Google was updating Wikipedia and falsely accusing somebody of sex crimes on their Wikipedia pages, I think you could expect that Google would get sued in that situation, as well. It’s really about the source of the information.