TLDR:
a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.
I'm getting pretty sick of these bots posting links to news articles without anything other than a clickbait title.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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Ugh, yeah, that's all the place has become; communities full of unsubstantial news articles for what is only substantial news a small amount of the time.
Lemmy is like 80% really shitty newspaper, 18% hollow rooms, and 2% community.
2% community lfg 💪
All I can muster right now: 🚩
But then you won't see what the idiots at the Y Combinator-funded Hackernews think is important enough to post! You'll have to go to every news site individually to read the say-nothing garbage major publications post to hit a quota.
Why would you want humans filtering out the trash and only posting what they find interesting?? That's not what social media is for! It should just be a big RSS feed of every billionaire-owned media empire. You fool!
But the court found that, unlike traditional search engines that merely present lists of links to third-party statements, Google’s tool made “independent, new, and substantive statements” based on its own misinterpretation of links on the Internet.
That’s a problem, the court said, because while publishers may have been able to sue to stop third parties from publishing defamatory statements appearing in Google search results, only Google can correct the underlying algorithm and outputs displayed in AI Overviews. And because, at least initially, the company did not, it therefore “must be held accountable,” the court ruled. Beyond that, Google’s argument was deemed particularly weak, since the AI overview in this case “contains statements that do not appear in the search results at all.”
That's pretty cut and dry, especially for the parties that were being incorrectly represented in the overview despite letters to Google for cease-and-desist.
Your quotes carrot is in the wrong place for the first paragraph.
Legend 🥕 Fixed
Give it time, people are becoming dumber and dumber after all... I wouldn't be surprised if future generations just ask Ai to do whatever they need, and will know even less about how the internet works.
I miss the days of Ask Jeeves.
I miss the days when the SEO bots weren't winning.
The ruling is flawed, searching the Internet has been an "AI" battle for 20 years using the predecessors of LLMs to sort out "what people really want" vs the websites that are precision honed to receive as many top-ranking search result returns as possible. Then, of course, Google forgot the n't in "At least don't be Evil." and they started pushing promoted (aka paying customers') results higher in the rankings.
If you simply unplug Gemini, what replaces it? Is Hadoop "too smart" for the ruling? Multiple cross references of content and links and what all else proprietary algorithms the Google goblins cooked up over the last 20 years, at what point is that AI/not AI? If Gemini gets repackaged as "totally not AI tech" - does that make it now legal?
People do need to curb their enthusiasm, on both sides of the AI questions. It's a tool, it's not perfect for everything, it is good for some things, better than the best of what came before - for some things.
They are literally correct. If you really want to use google without the knowledge panels, AI, and ads, it actually exists: udm14.com
The ruling isn't final.
Happy cake day!