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Good. The true mark of AGI is when a company accepts liability and doesn’t bury “for entertainment purposes only” deep in their TOS. Same as it works with employees.

Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger.

But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results.

I think it's a completely reasonable position that companies making self-driving cars and question/answer systems are legally liable for any errors.

But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country. AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits. Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.

at the scale that google is at, it doesn't make an ounce of sense to hold a company liable for a potential mistruth. what if there's a 1/1000 chance of some error, then the company could be sued millions of times per day.

down vote all you want, but I firmly believe this is an example where the user needs to use some judgement on the information they receive and have some critical thinking skills. google would be right to remove all AI results from germany.

the user needs to use some judgement on the information they receive and have some critical thinking skills

how?

errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.

google would be right to remove all AI results from germany

i'd consider that a win.

By checking the citations rather than taking what’s generated at face value.

If it’s important, check it. If it’s not important, then it is pretty much just entertainment.

LLMs can be very useful in a general web search and save some time, but if you don’t put those literacy & critical thinking skills to the test and actually confirm anything, then you might as well not even have bothered with the search at all unless you’re hoping it can just replace all of your original thinking too.

> at the scale that google is at, it doesn't make an ounce of sense to hold a company liable for a potential mistruth

If a Google employee (like a support agent) says a mistruth, the company is liable and you can sue. They can’t just say “hihi oopsies our support agents are useless”

So scale of harm creates immunity, is that the argument ?
Did we not already see that with the financial sector in 2008?
Too big to fail. Lol.
How do you feel about the EPA, industrial accidents, oil spills etc? Does scale give every company a free pass for damages?
That's not a fair comparison. If oil companies would get sued for every leak, they had to face millions of law suites and wouldn't be competitive anymore.

(Sarcasm to support your argument)

Then Google can either discontinue their AI or make damn sure it's good.
It doesn't "bury [it] deep in their TOS", it says right under the box:

> AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses

They decided to hijack search and rewrite other peoples websites as their own.

If they want to claim ownership, then they will have to accept responsibility.

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> Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger

Mercedes-Benz does this in limited cases. Waymo does it generally. (In China, Level 4 and 5 transfers risk to the manufacturer. This is the correct way to do it.)

Banning all technology because someone might misuse it is an illogical extreme.

As far as I can tell the ruling is more nuanced. If AI is defaming you, there needs to be a way to correct the record.

A company being open to liability does not mean it is always liable, just that it can be if it really messes up (especially if there are aggravating circumstances, e.g. you need to drag them to court to issue a correction).

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Why would that mean AGI? You can get into liability-accepting territory by restricting scope, a lot easier than by making your AI smarter.

Self-driving cars don't need to be particularly good for companies to make models where they accept liability in some circumstances, and the cars refuse to drive in other circumstances.

Wasn’t Tesla found to have FSD disengaging just before a crash so that the driver would be at fault?
No. Sometimes it does disengage because things are going wrong, but those incidents are still reported the same as if it stayed engaged.

I found one time Musk was using a few seconds of disengagement to insult a driver, but it still would have counted as an FSD crash by Tesla's statistics.

Ai results that nobody wanted in the first place?
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Why is it good? Everyone with common sense knows AI can be wrong. And it’s not buried in their TOS. It’s in the chat box. But even if it wasn’t, it’s ridiculous to create liability for AI chatbots.
> The true mark of AGI

Can we just trash this as a marketing term? If/when AGI arrives there will be no point quibbling over competency. What we are looking at is just bad search results

Nearly the entire American tech industry has been super heavily selected for people who undervalue the legal language with crazy implications buried everywhere.

Otherwise most of it would not even exist.

Everyone would have continued paying out the nose to the IBM’s of the world year after year (who had unusual willingness to sign short ambiguously worded custom contracts to their own disadvantage, if paid vast amounts of money).

And be on mainframes to this very day… maybe Y combinator and HN wouldnt even exist in that world.

> Nearly the entire American tech industry has been super heavily selected for people who undervalue the legal language with crazy implications buried everywhere.

A lot of people in IT seem to think law and contracts are in a sense mathematical. They aren't; they're more like a high school book report - to be interpreted, as objectively as possible, but definitely also establishing the intent behind the letters.

Particularly contracts - no, you can't trick your way into things in most cases. "Surprising" clauses are invalid in most legal systems, in particular if one party to the contract is a layperson.

That is a false dichotomy. The solution to failed laws and regulations is not crime and corruption. The solution is to hold the policial and business leadership accountable; to fix the laws and regulations.

The entire American tech industry has exported Americas predatory, parasitic, and unethical consumer laws (the majority of which are ghost written by the wealthy and corporate legal teams). When I studied law in school decades ago, tactics like bait-and-switch, false advertisting, intentionally misleading or deceptive practices etc to sell products or contracts were illegal across the developed world.

Those illegal, anti-consumer tactics were the SOP of every tech startup I can think of from the early 2000's onwards; following the same route of initially offering a compelling feature set to attract and entice users – usually for free – until securing a certain number of users or funding, then changing the value proposition to exploit that user base, and extract as much wealth from them as possible, ad infinitum.

Today these tactics are known as enshittification, and the average American pseudo-libertarian software engineer will say this is fine, but that's what every anti-consumer parasite and criminal has said in history. Lying, misleading, and exploiting people for financial gain is fundamentally immoral, corrupt, and sociopathic, therefore it should be illegal. Just because it's the norm, or a digital product, you wrote that in the T&C's, or your doing everything behind the liability shield of an LLC, doesn't change that.

What ever happened to the concept of building a valuable, quality product and stable returns for generations? Working to improve the quality of life and standard of living of the community? Of the world? I feel like a 1950's traditional conservative when I suggest that, but most Americans are so heavily indoctrinated with corporate greed and sociopathy they'd consider that sentiment radical leftist extremism. I'm an athiest, but ya'll need jesus (the real brown socialist one). Many would argue Americas current institutional collapse is the natural result of this systemic corruption.

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