[23792] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script of my national radio report yesterday
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Tue Jun 16 10:57:36 2026
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2026 07:47:56 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
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This is the script of my national network radio report yesterday
regarding a new German court decision holding Google responsible for
their AI Overviews misinformation, and the potential global impacts of
that decision. As always there may have been minor wording variations
from this script as I presented this report live on air.
- - -
Yeah, it's finally happened. A court has directly and strongly pushed
back against Google's ridiculous excuses about misinformation that
spews from their AI. And while this is a ruling from a German court it
is so incredibly well reasoned and written that it is very likely to
have significant impact on thinking about these issues around the
world, and so could ultimately influence other courts everywhere.
We've talked numerous times about AI hallucinations and
misinformation, and this particular case involved Google's notorious
AI Overviews. Recent studies have suggested that at Google search
scale Google is spewing out hundreds of thousands of incorrect AI
Overview answers per minute, tens of millions of inaccurate answers
per hour. And Google has consistently tried to evade responsibility
for these with disclaimers that "AI can make mistakes" and users
should double-check the AI answers.
But pretty much everybody knows, and studies have confirmed, that
almost nobody tries to verify those answers that Google presents in a
very authoritative, "this is the truth" kind of way. I mean seriously,
what's the point of getting an AI Overview answer and then having to
go digging around researching to try figure out if it's accurate or
not? You might as well have done the research yourself in the first
place without having your time wasted by an unreliable AI answer that
Google itself tells you not to trust!
Also, when Google provides links in their AI Overview answers that
connect to the sites that supposedly relate to the answers, it seems
that most of the time you can dig through those sites until the cows
come home and be unable to find anything that relates to the Google AI
Overview answers themselves.
The German court brilliantly notes all these points and various
others. The ruling explains that Google isn't just pointing you at
sites where you might find useful information related to your
search -- as traditional Google search did for decades -- but rather is
creating a wholly new authoritative-seeming answer, an answer that
cannot be reasonably attributed to anyone but Google itself.
This kind of determination leads us directly into the kinds of
arguments that I and others have long been making, that AI answers
should not be exempt from the responsibilities that would come into
play if those same kinds of authoritative sounding answers had been
issued by a human being at the same Big Tech firm in response to user
queries.
The kinds of legal protections in place to shield these firms from
being liable for third-party content simply do not reasonably apply to
first-party created content like AI Overview answers. And this goes
far beyond AI Overviews of course, across the entire realm of Large
Language Model AI including also AI chatbots, some of which we know
have reportedly been implicated in providing advice involved in both
murder and suicide cases. New nightmarish instances like these keep
occurring, despite Big Tech claims that they're increasing associated
safety protocols.
The German court decision holding Google responsible for AI Overview
answers is preliminary and there will likely be appeals of course. But
the actual reasoning of the decision is enormously solid and
persuasive, and may well end up being the first significant crack in
the "we don't care" excuse agenda of Google and the other Big Tech AI
firms, irrespective of how this specific German court case proceeds.
And from this crack, perhaps we will start to see more moves to
actually protect society from AI abuses rather than governments
actively encouraging largely if not completely unregulated AI systems.
It's going to be a tough slog, because as we know, many politicians in
both parties are terrified of the financial and political power of the
major Big Tech firms, and even when a politician will privately admit
that, for example, they know a massive new data center is going to
ruin a community that they represent, they may not have the courage to
actually take a stance against it.
So whether or not we'll ever see Big Tech AI CEOs being held
personally, criminally responsible for the worst abuses of their
AIs -- imagine if you will CEOs being publicly perp walked in shackles to
their new abodes in prisons -- at least holding the firms financially
responsible for the damages done by their AI systems would be a step
in the right direction.
And it appears that the court in Germany, that just effectively told
Google to take their excuses for AI misinformation and stuff them, has
finally moved the needle in a positive way. It's still a long, long
path ahead, and with the untold hundreds of billions of dollars being
poured into AI by Big Tech, the battle to protect society will be long
and arduous. But perhaps that German court has now exposed a bit of
light at the end of that very long tunnel. We shall see.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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