Ai and ml

Hush. children, what’s that sound? Has the flood gates’ key been found?

OPINION Tech companies hate liability, or at least the sort that makes them liable if something goes wrong. It doesn’t much matter if what they ship is buggy, shabby or simply blows chunks, it’s on you for using it. You fool. Corporates can get service level agreements to focus their suppliers’ minds, and life-critical applications such as health or transport wire in liability through regulation, but shlubs like us get nothing.

This goes double for LLMs, which lie to our face all day every day and twice on Sundays. It’s on you to check. If you file a court brief with an hallucinated cite, or lose your production database to an insane agent, it’s on, yes, you. Again. Terms and conditions. If the AI companies were liable for the things they ship they know are faulty, the industry would look very different. 

Thus it is very interesting indeed that a Munich court has just found Google strictly liable for bad things that its own AI is doing — in this case, making false and potentially very damaging statements about a couple of publishers. The AI Overview linked the publishers to various scams, in prime position at the top of the search results. 

Normally, search results don’t make the search engine liable for what it digs up. These results weren’t dug up, they were made up. Normally, if a page returned by a search engine contains legally actionable material, you can go after the page's author. Here, there were no such pages. The author was Google’s own AI. No escaping it, the court decided, someone had to be liable and that someone was Google. 

The company argued in its defense that because everyone knew you can’t trust AI results, everyone knew to check what AI Overview told them. This worked as well as Alex Jones arguing that as he was a performance artist rather than a journalist, the massive damage caused by his Infowars platform wasn’t his responsibility. Don’t blame me Pompei, said Vesuvius, I was just putting on a fireworks show. No sale. Google, you are guilty. Stop doing it. 

This may seem on its face to be nothing new, not different in principle to a lawyer abusing AI and eating judge boot. The difference is that the lawyer can either stop abusing AI or stop using it altogether. Google can do neither. It has bet the shop on an AI it can’t control, one with a court-tested liability that can’t be fixed until hallucinations and false equivalencies are fixed. 

Businesses that use AI have indeed learned what Google said in court and have evolved their own processes to detoxify AI internally. It means using skilled humans to check and verify. It means that productivity benefits are as hard to find as Alex Jones’ donations to the Southern Poverty Law Center. As any sensible human knows, productivity isn’t the one metric to bind them all. Quality, value and integrity are part of the equation, and the skill is balancing the incalculable against the countable. 

Google can’t do that. It has mustered under the ‘AI All The Things’ banner, but unlike its fellow LLMinati, Google’s primary product is serving facts to billions of people. There can be no mitigating human filter, no legal prophylactic of ‘we made it up, but you know what we’re like’. Google multiplied is liability the day it made AI Overview not an option, but unavoidable and the first thing you see. It’s rolling out more and more layers of AI-mediated content in lieu of actual search results, despite nobody wanting that, under the corporate hallucination that lie ability trumps liability. Which has been true for most tech companies most of the time, but no longer. 

It’s improbable that Google can change course and do the obvious thing, incorporate an AI kill switch in its search product. It can no more compete on quality of results than a dodo can enter the All Mauritius Aviad Aerobatics championship. Which is a shame, because the first rats of legal liability have scuttled ashore. 

Expect this process to continue. Proponents of AGI are adept at minimizing the implicit — and in this court case, explicit — unreliability of LLMs as an unsolved problem. Humans are unreliable too, after all. We have evolved our own error detection and correction protocols, be they the scientific method or the police and legal systems in general, or internal reviews and test cycles in corporate. There is no way that AI’s insinuation into process can or should be exempt from these systems, at least while it mucks things up like a stoned teenager in a muscle car.

The tech industry has avoided liability on the grounds of immaturity, that what it does is so wonderful that it shouldn’t be held back because of flaws that will take too long to fix.

Immaturity only lasts so long, then you have to take the consequences not only of your actions, but of refusing to change your behavior. The Munich court has fired the warning shot of those consequences, and Google must search its soul and find the truth. If, that is, its AI will let it.  ®