Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bc.ctvnews.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 434 posts

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

#111

Post by johnwalkr »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #107
johnwalkr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Comparable locations" is very subjective, but Vancouver vs Denver is one I've heard of that seemed convincing to me. Then again, I've never been to Denver.

Those cities are not remotely comparable. Vancouver and Seattle are a much better comparison. From a cursory search an average home in Vancouver is $CAD 1.1 mil and an average home in Seattle is $USD 800k. So once you take into account exchange rate they are actually fairly similar.

You're right about the comparison between Seattle and Vancouver, but "housing is half the price" is a common comment from Canadians that have made the move (both online and people I know personally). It may be an exaggeration, but the US has 10x the population and more medium-large cities to choose from so I think it's somehow true at least some people can find a significantly cheaper place that is personally comparable and has a job for them. If you're a software engineer that lives in Vancouver (1x salary, 1x housing prices) and loves the mountains and wants to move to another mountain-adjacent place, Denver (2x salary, 0.5x housing prices) is indeed pretty enticing compared to Seattle (2.5x salary, 1x housing prices) or Calgary (1x salary, 0.4x housing prices).[1]

[1] Guess but not complete wild-guess multipliers

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

#112

Post by pintxo »

eszed wrote: post #109
pjc50 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The long-term brand you want is Miele. They're not cheap but my parents' dishwasher is approaching 30 years old.

Without knowing anything particular about Miele, all this anecdote suggests is that they were great thirty years ago . They could well have enshittified between now and then. I'm at the point where I don't trust any brands at all anymore. The next time I need to make a major appliance purchase I'll buy a subscription to Consumer Reports and blindly follow their recommendation - I still trust them.

Apparently Miele has started to have quality issues. But they still might be a good bet, if only for the fact that they are (probably?) the last family run business in the market.

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

#113

Post by zihotki »

Georgelemental wrote: post #103
throwaway2037 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada is a good democracy. As your parliament to split Air Canada into multiple carriers or reduce any state-provided advantages to allow better competitors to emerge.

> Canada is a good democracy Didn't they freeze hundreds of people's bank accounts, with no due process, for peaceful political demonstrations? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385 No better than Nigeria: https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/11/nigeria-finally-unfreeze...

They're good, not perfect.

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

#114

Post by postalrat »

HWR_14 wrote: post #67
nkrisc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d have to do so without appearing to intend to do so, and in either case would be fraudulent.

I don't see how it's fraud or would need to have a disguised intent.

If your intent is to get a wrong answer and you succeed then nice job. Do you really deserve a reward?

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

#115

Post by reaperman »

rsynnott wrote: post #102
colechristensen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if you don't want your job replaced by a bot, perhaps you should not be acting like one. Call center folks, especially the first couple of layers of them, are on scripts. They have decision trees and what to say written down. Bots can be much more dynamic than them. It's a pretty terrible job unless you're fairly uniquely predisposed to liking that kind of work.

This case is an interesting example where the LLM is _worse_ than that; it's not on rails in the same way a front-line call-centre worker would be, so can make stuff up with impunity. This would never have happened with a conventional scripted hotline; at worst it could only have happened if the caller was escalated to someone with the authority to make stuff up, but for a simple question like this they wouldn't have…

It could be though. The LLM could just choose from options one through 10 of a list of prescribed responses, and an interposer could validate that the output of the LLM truly is an integer and then send that chosen message to the customer.

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

#116

Post by ooboe »

"In an argument that appeared to flabbergast a small claims adjudicator in British Columbia, the airline attempted to distance itself from its own chatbot's bad advice by claiming the online tool was "a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions."

"This is a remarkable submission," Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) member Christopher Rivers wrote.""

From https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-c...

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

#117

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

ooboe wrote: post #116

"In an argument that appeared to flabbergast a small claims adjudicator in British Columbia, the airline attempted to distance itself from its own chatbot's bad advice by claiming the online tool was "a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions." "This is a remarkable submission," Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) member Christopher Rivers wrote."" From https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbi…

How is this different from me getting one of my friends to work at Air Canada and promise me a billion dollars to cancel my flight?

Will Air Canada be legal for my friend going against company policy?

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

#118

Post by vundercind »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #117
ooboe wrote: post #116

"In an argument that appeared to flabbergast a small claims adjudicator in British Columbia, the airline attempted to distance itself from its own chatbot's bad advice by claiming the online tool was "a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions." "This is a remarkable submission," Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) member Christopher Rivers wrote."" From https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbi…

How is this different from me getting one of my friends to work at Air Canada and promise me a billion dollars to cancel my flight? Will Air Canada be legal for my friend going against company policy?

The computer only does what they told it to.

What they told it to do was to behave very unpredictably. They shouldn’t have done that.

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

#119

Post by BadHumans »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #117
ooboe wrote: post #116

"In an argument that appeared to flabbergast a small claims adjudicator in British Columbia, the airline attempted to distance itself from its own chatbot's bad advice by claiming the online tool was "a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions." "This is a remarkable submission," Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) member Christopher Rivers wrote."" From https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbi…

How is this different from me getting one of my friends to work at Air Canada and promise me a billion dollars to cancel my flight? Will Air Canada be legal for my friend going against company policy?

Chatbots aren't people and people are actually separate legal entities responsible for their own actions.

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

#120

Post by kazinator »

My take away from this is that Air Canada would rather fight a customer in court than suffer a few hundred dollar refund as the cost of figuring out they have a flaw in the consistency of their system. (And in the face of an extreme unlikelihood of winning against prevailing common sense, too.)
Post reply on HN