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Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

bc.ctvnews.ca

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Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#21

Post by potatolicious »

ilaksh wrote: post #16

November 2022.. might have been a pretty weak model or just out of date info. This to me is a cautionary tale against deploying cheap small LLMs instead of using larger models. I think 7b models are very tempting to many business people who may value profits over just about anything else.

... Larger models aren't immune from hallucinations, nor is the rate of hallucination negligible enough to ignore with larger models.

This is a fundamental issue with the underlying technology, one that many companies in this space refuse to reckon with.

A lot of "this can be automated with AI!" startups are relying on the basic assumption that hallucinations can be tolerated - cases like this really narrow the field of use cases where that is true.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#23

Post by kazinator »

If a vendor communicates multiple different prices for the same thing in different places, such as different areas of their website, or their website versus an e-mail flyer, or any pieces of paper from the vendor, they must give you the lowest price among all of them and not make excuses like that you should check the other communications and understand that the price is one of the higher ones. This is just common sense.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#24

Post by cscurmudgeon »

ilaksh wrote: post #16

November 2022.. might have been a pretty weak model or just out of date info. This to me is a cautionary tale against deploying cheap small LLMs instead of using larger models. I think 7b models are very tempting to many business people who may value profits over just about anything else.

There is no evidence they used a small LLM. There is no evidence that LLM size is the issue. Environmentally bad to use a large model when a smaller one could work just as fine.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#25

Post by ilaksh »

potatolicious wrote: post #21
ilaksh wrote: post #16

November 2022.. might have been a pretty weak model or just out of date info. This to me is a cautionary tale against deploying cheap small LLMs instead of using larger models. I think 7b models are very tempting to many business people who may value profits over just about anything else.

... Larger models aren't immune from hallucinations, nor is the rate of hallucination negligible enough to ignore with larger models. This is a fundamental issue with the underlying technology, one that many companies in this space refuse to reckon with. A lot of "this can be automated with AI!" startups are relying on the basic assumption that hallucinations can be tolerated - cases like this really narrow the field…

Hallucination or inaccuracy is dramatically worse with 7b models versus the largest ones.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#26

Post by quirkot »

potatolicious wrote: post #21
ilaksh wrote: post #16

November 2022.. might have been a pretty weak model or just out of date info. This to me is a cautionary tale against deploying cheap small LLMs instead of using larger models. I think 7b models are very tempting to many business people who may value profits over just about anything else.

... Larger models aren't immune from hallucinations, nor is the rate of hallucination negligible enough to ignore with larger models. This is a fundamental issue with the underlying technology, one that many companies in this space refuse to reckon with. A lot of "this can be automated with AI!" startups are relying on the basic assumption that hallucinations can be tolerated - cases like this really narrow the field…

Just wait till an aggressive lawyer finds out about this. Gonna be a lot of companies taken to the cleaner for hallucinations

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#27

Post by plantain »

Air Canada has always been like this.

They were notorious amongst the stranded-abroad community during COVID for selling tickets on flights they weren't operating and had no intention to operate, then refusing to refund, except with credits that also expired before they intended to operate.

Scammers from top to bottom.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#28

Post by dghlsakjg »

usaar333 wrote: post #11

I find it hard to understand the calculus on Air Canada's side of fighting this. Not a lot of money and really bad press.

You overestimate AC.

They are buried in compensation claims right now due to them claiming that crew shortages in 2021 and 2022 were out of their control, and the government regulators disagreeing with them.

My guess is that no one with any power bothered to look at this until it was too late to settle, and they thought it was worth the cost of fees to see if they could get out of paying.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#29

Post by petesergeant »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #10
renewiltord wrote: post #6

Where's the chatbot accessible from? Can't find it. I assume it was some old-school KB query chatbot not an LLM? Date says Nov 2022 and LLMs hadn't become quite as popular at that time yet. They have to obviously be responsible. What a nonsensical claim.

What difference does it make? If it happened today with an LLM the outcome should be the same.

> What difference does it make?

In liability, none, but it'd at least be more understandable if it was an LLM, rather than something that should have been hard-coded with the right answers.

Re: Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal

#30

Post by janalsncm »

Good. Company outsources customer “service” to a completely unreliable piece of software, which goes to show how much they care about their customers. And then they argue in court that customers shouldn’t even trust their own software! So essentially they have increased profits by cutting customer service jobs, replaced humans with a stochastic parrot, and now don’t want to be responsible for the drawbacks of this decision. They want all of the upside and none of the downside.
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