David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)The interesting thing about the German court ruling against Google is not the verdict. The fact that, if you put libel on your web site, you are liable for it even if you used a machine to automatically generate libel, should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the law at any point in the last century or so: humans have agency, the tools that they use do not shield them from liability, no matter how obfuscating they are.
The bit I suspect will have much more impact longer term is one of the defences entered by Google's lawyers. Somewhat more verbose in the original German, but it boiled down to: Everyone knows LLMs produce nonsense, no one should ever trust the output of an LLM in any situation that matters, it's not Google's fault if people read the output of an LLM and believed it might have some connection to reality.
It's debatable whether everyone knows that, but this is now an official statement entered into the court record that at least one of the major LLM vendors knows this. And that's now an on-the-record statement made under penalty of perjury that can be entered as evidence in any court case against companies selling LLM-integrated tooling.
I suspect that this will show up in a lot of court cases over the next few years and probably have a much bigger long-term impact than the ruling. Any claim about utility made by vendors of 'AI' tools is now open to lawsuits ranging from misleading advertising to outright fraud as a result of this.
Google would probably have been much better advised to settle the case rather than enter that claim as evidence. Imagine if a car manufacturer had entered a defence against liability in case of a collision by saying 'everyone knows automobiles are impossible to operate safely on the roads and anyone who buys one should know better than to take it on the public highway'. Google's lawyers have just done the equivalent for the 'AI' industry.
EDIT: It hopefully goes without saying, but just in case: I am not a lawyer, this is commentary from someone who watches the industry with a growing sense of disgust, not legal advice.
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