A bunch of other scenarios are stuck in a gray area for now: Google’s generated answers are drawing from third parties but not necessarily directly quoting them. So is that original content, or is it more like the snippets that appear under search results?
You searched Google. The AI hallucinated an answer. Who’s legally responsible?
Platforms like Google have been protected from liability, but generative AI could put that at risk.
While generative search tools like AI Overview represent new territory in terms of Section 230 protections, the risks are not hypothetical. Apps that say they can use AI to identify mushrooms for would-be foragers are already available in app stores, despite evidence that these tools aren’t super accurate. Even in Google’s demo of their new video search, a factual error was generated, as The Verge noticed.
Eating the source code of the internet
There’s another question here beyond when Section 230 may or may not apply to AI-generated answers: the incentives that AI Overview does or does not contain for the creation of reliable information in the first place. AI Overview relies on the web continuing to contain plenty of researched, factual information. But the tool also seems to make it harder for users to click through to those sources.
“Our main concern is about the potential impact on human motivation,” Jacob Rogers, associate general counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation, said in an email. “Generative AI tools must include recognition and reciprocity for the human contributions that they are built on, through clear and consistent attribution.”
The Wikimedia Foundation hasn’t seen a major drop in traffic to Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects as a direct result of AI chatbots and tools to date, but Rogers said that the foundation was monitoring the situation. Google has, in the past, relied on Wikipedia to populate its Knowledge Panels, and draws from its work to provide fact-check pop-up boxes on, for instance, YouTube videos on controversial topics.
There’s a central tension here that’s worth watching as this technology becomes more prevalent. Google has an incentive to present its AI-generated answers as authoritative. Otherwise, why would you use them?
“On the other hand,” Jain said, “particularly in sensitive areas like health, it will probably want to have some kind of disclaimer or at least some cautionary language.”
Google’s AI Overview contains a small note at the bottom of each result clarifying that it is an experimental tool. And, based on my unscientific poking around, I’d guess that Google has opted for now to avoid generating answers on some controversial topics.
The Overview will, with some tweaking, generate a response to questions about its own potential liability. After a couple dead ends, I asked Google, “Is Google a publisher.”
“Google is not a publisher because it doesn’t create content,” begins the reply. I copied that sentence and pasted it into another search, surrounded by quotes. The search engine found 0 results for the exact phrase.