You searched Google. The AI hallucinated an answer. Who’s legally responsible?

Google’s shift toward using AI to generate a written answer to user searches instead of providing a list of links ranked algorithmically by relevance was inevitable. Before AI Overview — introduced last week for US users — Google had Knowledge Panels, those information boxes that appear toward the top of some searches, incentivizing users to get their answers directly from Google, rather than clicking through to a result. 

AI Overview summarizes search results for a portion of queries, right at the top of the page. The results draw from multiple sources, which are cited in a drop-down gallery under the summary. As with any AI-generated response, these answers vary in quality and reliability.