(Shrug) That sounds like their problem, if they reflexively believe everything Google's AI tells them. No one I respect, care for, or work with would believe such a thing without additional justification.
Anyone who does accept Google's AI output blindly will soon find that their mistaken opinion of CamperBob2 is the least of their problems. There is a reason Google goes (well) out of their way to warn people that the results may be wrong. That should be sufficient warning for reasonable people of good faith.
Are you really that ignorant of the past? There are so many cases of people suffering from wrong accusations. They get death threats. People harass them on the street. Throw stones into their windows. Beat up their kids. Trash their car. Deny them jobs, or leases, kick them out of their apartment.
You have no idea what it can mean to end up in such a situation.
The source of the accusation is arguably more impactful than the accusation itself.
No one with a straight face would compare an AI overview saying someone is an asshole to the New York Times running a story saying someone is an asshole.
If the New York Times wrote someone was allegedly an asshole, and Google Search condenses to presenting that as a fact, I’d bet you my left kidney that the general public would be quick to take that at face value.
And your beef is with the NYT in that case. Not with the neutral aggregator who includes a specific disclaimer that its output may be incorrect due to unavoidable technological limitations.
It doesn’t matter who you’re angry with in that case, because you’re going to suffer the consequences regardless. No lawsuit is going to reimburse for that.
No one is going to suffer consequences because of a Google AI summary. If they do, that's not Google's problem. It's someone else's fault, principally those who blindly acted on information they were told was potentially incorrect.
In the world according to you, AI couldn't exist. Or more likely, it would be accessible only to academic and corporate/financial/government/military elites. That's not OK, and I'm unwilling to join you in pretending that it is.
What's not okay is a world where unreliable tools can destroy people's lives based on entirely false information, and the purveyors of those tools and false claims get away scot-free afterwards.
So your position is that the general public should be given access to AI only when it is either capable of flawless accuracy, or when the AI provider is prepared to assume unbounded liability despite warning the user that perfect accuracy is not possible.
> No one is going to suffer consequences because of a Google AI summary.
No one is, until someone is. You could say the same about newspapers, TV, or the internet.
> If they do, that's not Google's problem.
Well yes, it is, at least in Germany for now, where at least one judge seems to see it that way. And that's correct, IMHO, because Google would (in that case) make something appear as factual information when it is not.
> It's someone else's fault, principally those who blindly acted on information they were told was potentially incorrect.
Those people are definitely at fault; history is full of examples of mobs acting horribly based on shallow, incomplete, misleading, flawed, or flat out wrong information. But you can't just put all blame on those mobs, when someone gave them this information - or do you think, for example, Donald Trump played no part in the January 6 riots and should not be held accountable for it?
> In the world according to you, AI couldn't exist. Or more likely, it would be accessible only to academic and corporate/financial/government/military elites. That's not OK, and I'm unwilling to join you in pretending that it is.
That isn't my stance at all. AI should exist, and it should be widely available in my opinion. I don't even think this is primarily about AI, but entities in a position of power acting responsibly, such as Google (which has worked hard to position itself as a gateway to information and steward of facts.)
I think we should not put the burden of verifying information entirely on consumers, we shouldn't allow big corporations to run the largest social experiment in history on their own terms, and we need to talk about responsibility and safety.
> So your position is that the general public should be given access to AI only when it is either capable of flawless accuracy, or when the AI provider is prepared to assume unbounded liability despite warning the user that perfect accuracy is not possible.
That is neither my, nor the sibling's, nor this ruling's position. The issue the court took was that Google presented AI-generated information in a shape that was indistinguishable to common users from the previously statistically sourced factoids in Google Search - a product that historically allowed to search the internet for things and get back search results, not AI-provided guesses and hopefully-correct information.
The entire point is that companies should not be allowed to use AI recklessly. This point is also one that the Pope made in his encyclical, and the EU posits in the AI act, by the way.
But you can't just put all blame on those mobs, when someone gave them this information - or do you think, for example, Donald Trump played no part in the January 6 riots and should not be held accountable for it?
I'm missing the comparison here. Trump (in)famously did not post any disclaimers. He did not leave any room for doubt when he accused the Democrats of stealing the election. He spread feces and called it fact, so yes, he should certainly have been held accountable for the consequences. His voters, however, decided not to do so, and that was the end of it.
The issue the court took was that Google presented AI-generated information in a shape that was indistinguishable to common users from the previously statistically sourced factoids in Google Search - a product that historically allowed to search the internet for things and get back search results, not AI-provided guesses and hopefully-correct information.
Did they, or did they not, include a highly-visible disclaimer that the results might be incorrect?
I'm hammering on this, not just because I think it's what should have determined the outcome of the case, but also because the last few times I've seen Google AI summaries, they did not include such a disclaimer. Gemini itself still does, but the instant results on the search page don't appear to. Which is obviously not OK.
If they have stopped warning users, or if they didn't warn the users in the situation leading up to the lawsuit, then that more-or-less instantly flips me over to your side. We wouldn't actually have anything to argue about in that case.
The ones who were defamed are companies, and the ones who don’t check the AI generated response are their potential customers which won’t buy from them.
It is obvious that the defamed companies are the ones having a problem, not the ignorant viewers.
Why should those companies not hold Google liable for that outcome?
I don't know about that. Imagine I want to sort people into employable and unemployable based on AI summaries. After filtering the employable pile is large enough. You being in the unemployeable pile and me accepting it blindly, is not my problem. If there is any at all.
If those are things you legitimately care about before you spend one penny on a T-Shirt, then you are. Or you did your research before hand. Or you’re just not buying the T-Shirt.
Or you don’t care about those things at all, and you will buy the T-Shirt that’s in front of you right now rather than wait later and buy one that better reflects your supposed values when you’ve done an appropriate amount of research. Using AI may even reduce the amount of time you spend on that part.
Your T-Shirt buying patterns & values are not my concern though.
You are confusing who is the party that is injured--as many in this thread are. We are not talking about the consumer who buys a non-fairtrade t-shirt, when he would rather had a fairtrade one. It's about the t-shirt producers who is legitimately fairtrade but whose business is now in the shitter because of a lying AI.
LLMs can’t lie. They are incapable of telling either the truth or lying. To the extent that they are in any way useful, it’s recognizing that they are text generators attached to crawlers and other tools that can with the right inputs produce useful generated text that may also incidentally be correct or incorrect.
Businesses might (well, will) suffer because people are misusing AI, but it is a misuse to do anything with it without an additional verification step.
To be clear here, I have no issue with Google taking it on the chin in cases like this, but what the comment I was originally responding to had this:
> 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.
And my point is this: if it matters, verification is not optional. If it doesn’t matter, then fine, skip the verification step, but if you’re taking whatever text is generated by a GPT at face value without understanding what that is or being able to determine the source inputs for the “claims” it outputs, then you’re part of the problem because sometimes the source is just a GPT-generated web page, and that’s obviously not trustworthy. Sometimes it’s a MediaWiki site page that doesn’t actually exist, but because it’s MediaWiki it’s not going to return a 404. Using a tool requires understanding it including its failure modes, and in the case of LLMs that means: trust nothing, verify everything.
No, you did not subtract those things from the UK pay. The $86k pre tax UK wage comes down to something like $64k post tax. Whereas a $125–160k US earner in South Dakota takes home $97-120k, paying another $6k for health insurance. 91 is in fact larger than 64.
UK tech salaries are also not high. And 64k pounds for a history and/or business major is quite right. Do not forget also: history is a overrun study with many people afterwards driving taxis
WSL 1 was not a VM in a traditional sense. WSL 1 was a Windows subsystem which translated Linux syscalls into NT syscalls (e.g. file open). NT has capabilities there from its origins in the 90s supporting in theory user spaces for posix/os2/...
The whole forum here is bashing Windows for being thermal / performance disaster compared to apple products. I do not see how a laptop running Linux will evade the same fate (at least the bashing :).
When I switched my desktop from Windows 10 -> Debian, I noticed the fans ran less (until video games). And I pretty much ran the same apps. 1/2 of the complaining is a lack of being able to choose/clean up that is running!
On Qubes OS my P16 has abysmal battery life, but that's OK! I own my system, it is more secure than the two main slap fighter camps ITT, and the battery is really only a 30-min UPS to me (I always plug in). I never understood thin underpowered craptop enjoyers and their smug eight hour battery life aura, like... just use a pen and paper notebook at that point!
It can destroy you. You are analyzing this on the assumption that people are rational and have capacity to do the check. They have neither.
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