Very Dubious

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

For all the reasons above AND ALSO because this particular lawsuit is a defamation case

Privacy lawsuits are hard because most privacy laws are super super weak, and there's very rarely a lot of money or enforcement backing privacy laws for...twenty million reasons, really...

But defamation suits? Those have teeth.

(In large part because, at least in some countries and including in the US, defamation laws protect public figures the least - and "public figures" legally includes most if not all politicians, and a hell of a lot of other rich ppl too)

A German court has ruled that Google can be held directly liable for false claims made by its AI Overviews, a decision that could put a serious legal dent in the whole “the AI made me do it” defense. According to The Next Web, the Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction after Google’s AI Overviews wrongly tied two Munich publishers to scams, subscription traps, and dubious business practices. The court treated those AI-generated summaries as Google’s own statements, not just ordinary search results pointing to third-party pages. That distinction matters. Search engines have traditionally had more protection because they index and link to other people’s content. AI Overviews changes the machinery. Google is not just showing the web anymore. It is summarizing it, rewriting it, and sometimes apparently hallucinating a tiny legal grenade into the results page... This is still a preliminary injunction, not a final ruling, and Google can appeal. But for publishers, brands, SEOs, and anyone watching AI search swallow the results page, the message is clear: if Google wants to be the answer engine, courts may start treating it like the publisher of those answers.

I’ve grown up in an age that told me that denying yourself was good. Oh, you want cake? Here, have this chalk-dust square of not-cake - fewer calories, don’t you know! You want to lay on the sofa and read? Don’t you think you ought to clean the entire house first? Then perhaps you’ll deserve ten minutes. Make sure it’s approved book though - no reading purely for pleasure!

And most importantly - you must work hard to maintain yourself and your life in a certain way or no one will love you!

You know, the sort of thing S1 Gabriel said.

And then there’s Aziraphale who loves food and books and peace and his comfy clothes and his music and he is deeply loved by his demon who wants him to love all that. Aziraphale just wants a soft, sweet, delicious life - not a soldier or a leader, to just be him.

And Crowley loved that about him.

I just think that was very important about S1 Aziraphale (and not something that made much of after that) and it felt like I was being given permission to enjoy my life and I would still be able to be loved and to achieve things, even if I’d rather eat cake.

I think S2 and S3 forgot that about Aziraphale but I think that soft hedonism is a hugely important part of his character

See you soon...

So I finished my bookshop build just in time for the final. Very happy with how she came out and excited to see the blorbos bak in there again!!!!

Made mostly from trash/ recycled mats.

Excuse my shitty video editing skills. I thought I was a proper film boi with that sheet backdrop.

There's a highlight of me building it I'd u wanna check that out.

But what if the Eridians hear it very, very differently?

Eridians kind of ARE rocks, in more than one way, aren't they? Their outer appearance resembles rocks; and (this might be fanon, I don't recall right now) their *brains* are crystalline structures. They hatch from eggs that probably look like rocks. The environment they live in presumably contains rocks.

What if Eridians view rocks in a kind of reverent, aspirational way? Like "For rocks you are, and to rocks you shall return" but with less of a dismissive/humble tone and more of a "we are fundamental building blocks of reality in every form we take" thing.

And then Rocky is explaining to Eridian linguists who are studying Grace's English what his "human name" means, in English, and the linguists are giving him scandalized side-eye and going "So you met an alien and you told him that THAT was your name? [Wow, what kind of arrogant prick would do that?]" And Rocky is like, "no no nonono, I absolutely did not tell him that was my name. I gave him my real name! Grace picked that name for me, he didn't even ask me for suggestions, I had nothing to do with it! It was like right after we first met properly -- it didn't seem like he even had to think very hard about it."

The linguists question Grace about his reasoning, of course, and Grace is a little embarrassed because he thinks this is a "haha our human is bad at naming things, he found a Tau Ceti amoeba and named it Taumoeba, silly human!"

(Also, he does not want this to end up leading to a movie night where the first movie he has to show a bunch of ALIEN LINGUISTS is Rocky. Just seems like kind of a genre-mismatch, right? And Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire is *right there*. Or he could pick some movie that showcases a bunch of different real human languages really well, or... Something that's not a sports drama film.)

So he brushes it off a little, saying something like "Well, sure, it wasn't hard for me to decide to call him Rocky. I mean, it's kind of the obvious choice, yeah?"

And the thing is. It's established knowledge now that all humans can perceive things that Eridians can't perceive. It's not even like superstitious "ooh spooky aliens" woo-woo. Respected, credentialed Eridian biologists have confirmed that humans have *actual, physical organs* that let them detect phenomena that Eridians cannot detect.

i'll watch you sleep, pal. but, uh— you gotta wake up.

If the Please Do Not Eat That Professional thinks it's inconsequential enough to be funny, then the concerned caller knows it's no big deal. When I was a kid my mom called poison control because I ate not one but several crayons, and their advice was to make sure I didn't stray too far from a toilet for a few hours because suppositories are made of wax, too.

Also several years ago I ate half a sandwich while wondering why the hell it tasted so funny only to realize the Goo Gone I'd been cleaning with was leaking, and did so onto my sandwich. Poison Control now has an online form where you can put in what you ingested/how much/when/etc. and someone basically triages those out, so the kid who just drank a bunch of drain cleaner isn't in line behind the kid who ate a crayon. I got a call like twenty minutes later from a nurse who told me I was fine.

Oh! And if you want to know what the tool looks like, it now gives a "this is not a real case" option to let you test it out, so I became a hypothetical worried patient who accidentally took 1000mg of ibuprofen (max dose should be 800) instead of 1000mg of acetaminophen (which has a max dose of 1000) and ran the entire thing. It took me less than two minutes from this:

To this:

Below this screenshot I was advised to drink some water and that if symptoms developed in the next four hours, I should only be concerned in certain cases (e.g. nausea is normal, heart palpitations are a problem).

So what if it's a serious problem? Suddenly, hypothetical Nina was cleaning xir bathroom sink and got hit with some Drano splashback with xir eyes and mouth open! Here's what the tool suggested. As soon as I selected that I'd gotten Drano in my eyes, this popped up:

So I hypothetically went to rinse my eyes, came back, and indicated it'd also gotten into my mouth and onto my skin. Here was the result:

And finally, hypothetical!Nina made an extremely bad decision, then decided this wasn't how xe wanted things to end after all. So I selected the option that says I'd attempted self-harm, and this popped up. (I didn't get it in the screenshot, but there's a drawing of a sad snail at the top of the screen. I think it's supposed to remind you someone is there, this just isn't the best route to reach them.)