Ken Bensinger, The New York Times; Who Pays When A.I. Is Wrong?
"Search results that Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence technology, delivered at the top of the page included the falsehoods. And mentions of a legal settlement populated automatically when they typed “Wolf River Electric” in the search box.
With cancellations piling up and their attempts to use Google’s tools to correct the issues proving fruitless, Wolf River executives decided they had no choice but to sue the tech giant for defamation.
“We put a lot of time and energy into building up a good name,” said Justin Nielsen, who founded Wolf River with three of his best friends in 2014 and helped it grow into the state’s largest solar contractor. “When customers see a red flag like that, it’s damn near impossible to win them back.”
Theirs is one of at least six defamation cases filed in the United States in the past two years over content produced by A.I. tools that generate text and images. They argue that the cutting-edge technology not only created and published false, damaging information about individuals or groups but, in many cases, continued putting it out even after the companies that built and profit from the A.I. models were made aware of the problem.
Unlike other libel or slander suits, these cases seek to define content that was not created by human beings as defamatory — a novel concept that has captivated some legal experts."
