Does anyone like Google’s AI summaries? If so, they weren’t on the Judge’s bench in a specific Bavarian courtroom recently, where it was ruled that yes, Google is liable for the hallucinations of its search engine AI.

This was a civil case brought by a pair of Munich companies, both of whom were wrongfully slandered by LLM hallucinations. Google took the position that this information must have existed somewhere, and like presenting links to libelous websites — something they have no obligation to avoid — they should not be held accountable for what the summary at the top of the search results says.

Understandably, the judges ruled otherwise: this isn’t content Google is linking to. This is text that Google has generated. That they’re using the crappiest LLM model this side of a Commodore 64 to generate it doesn’t matter — the company is creating the text, and the company is liable, just as if a human employee wrote it by hand. If that human employee was so inept that he was giving other meatbags a bad name, like the search summaries do with Gemini, it wouldn’t help Google’s liability, either.

This could be a landmark ruling, though it isn’t final; Google does have the chance to appeal, and they absolutely will. If the appeal falls through, it’s not unlikely that Google will pull the plug on AI summaries on searches from the Federal Republic. Finally, a reason to point your VPN at Berlin. Any Germans hosting their own AI agents may also want to take note of the final ruling.

Header Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash