This reminds me a lot of the special policies Wikipedia has developed through experience about sensitive topics, like biographies of living persons, deaths, etc.
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That's deeply concerning, especially when these two companies control almost all the content we access through their search engines, browsers and LLMs.
This needs to be regulated. These companies should be held accountable for spreading false information or rumours, as it can have unexpected consequences.
A German 90s/2000s rapper (Textor, MC of Kinderzimmer Productions) produced a radio feature about facts and how hard it can be to prove them.
One personal example he added was about his Wikipedia Article that stated that his mother used to be a famous jazz singer in her birth country Sweden. Except she never was. The story had been added to an Album recension in a rap magazine years before the article was written. Textor explains that this is part of 'realness' in rap, which has little to do with facts and more with attitude.
When they approached Wikipedia Germany, it was very difficult to change this 'fact' about the biography of his mother. There was published information about her in a newspaper and she could not immediately prove who she was. Unfortunately, Textor didn't finish the story and moved on to the next topic in the radio feature.
Regulated how? Held accountable how? If we start fining LLM operators for pieces of incorrect information you might as well stop serving the LLM to that country.
> since it can have unexpected consequences
Generally you hold the person who takes action accountable. Claiming an LLM told you bad information isn’t any more of a defense than claiming you saw the bad information on a Tweet or Reddit comment. The person taking action and causing the consequences has ownership of their actions.
I recall the same hand-wringing over early search engines: There was a debate about search engines indexing bad information and calls for holding them accountable for indexing incorrect results. Same reasoning: There could be consequences. The outrage died out as people realize they were tools to be used with caution, not fact-checked and carefully curated encyclopedias.
> I'm worried about this. Companies like Wikipedia spent years trying to get things right,
Would you also endorse the same regulations against Wikipedia? Wikipedia gets fined every time incorrect information is found on the website?
EDIT: Parent comment was edited while I was replying to add the comment about outside of the US. I welcome some country to try regulating LLMs to hold them accountable for inaccurate results so we have some precedent for how bad of an idea that would be and how much the citizens would switch to using VPNs to access the LLM providers that are turned off for their country in response.
Other companies have been fined for misleading customers [0] after a product launch. So why make an exception for Big Tech outside the US?
And why is the EU the only bloc actively fining US Big Tech? We need China, Asia and South America to follow their lead.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
But how do we know they're telling the truth? How do we know it wasn't intentional? And more importantly, who's held accountable?
While Google's AI made the mistake, Google deployed it, branded it, and controls it. If this kind of error causes harm (like defamation, reputational damage, or interference in public opinion), intent doesn't necessarily matter in terms of accountability.
So while it's not illegal to be wrong, the scale and influence of Big Tech means they can't hide behind "it was the AI, not us."
The organization that runs the website, the Wikimedia Foundation, is also not a company. It's a nonprofit.
And the Wikimedia Foundation have not “spent years trying to get things right”, assuming you're referring to facts posted on Wikipedia. That was in fact a bunch of unpaid volunteer contributors, many of whom anonymous and almost all of whom unaffiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.
Did they ? Lots of people, and some research verify this, think it has a major left leaning bias, so while usually not making up any facts editors still cherry pick whatever facts fit the narrative and leave all else aside.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Tilly is my sister. It claims that she is of Irish descent. She is not. The Irish was her stepfather (my father), and some reporter confusing information about a stepparent with information about a parent.
Now some school in Seattle is claiming that she is an alumnus. That's also false. After moving from Texada, she went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Secondary_School and then https://esquimalt.sd61.bc.ca/.
But for all that, Wikipedia reporting does average out to more accurate than most newspaper articles...
You can't really argue with those facts.
It's a bigger problem than AI errors imo, there are so many Wikipedia articles that are heavily biased. A.I makes up silly nonsense maybe once in 200 queries, not 20% of the time. Also, people perhaps are more careful and skeptical with A.I results but take Wikipedia as a source of truth.