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

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

#191

Post by Scarblac »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #183
Drakim wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does make sense, but on the flipside, let's say that they start advertising discounts on TV, but when people try to pay the reduced rate they say "according to our ToS that TV ad was not authorized to lower the price". Obviously that wouldn't fly. So why would it fly with the AI chatbot's advertising discounts?

You'd normally expect a TV ad to be authorized to make offers. You wouldn't normally expect an AI chatbot to be authorized to make offers. Its purpose is to try to answer common questions and it has been widely covered in popular media that they hallucinate etc.

> Its purpose is to try to answer common questions

Yes. And therefore people should be able to assume that the answers are correct.

Some people have heard of ChatGPT, and some of those have heard that they hallucinate, sure. But that's still not that many people. And they don't know that a question answering chat bot like this is the same technology!

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

#192

Post by __turbobrew__ »

johnwalkr wrote: post #111
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compara…

I agree. There are lots of places in Canada with 0.3x house prices but once you filter for 1x salary and places which are nice to live in Canada you are left with an empty set.

The ideal situation is you get a remote job in Canada for 1x salary and live in a nice place with 0.3x houses. That is my current setup.

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

#193

Post by philipswood »

vundercind wrote: post #190
philipswood wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not these ones... These ones do what they "learned" from a lot of input data using a process that is us mimicking how we think brains could maybe function (kinda/sort off with a few unbiological "improvements").

Yes, these ones. Somebody told the computer to do all those things you just wrote.

Maybe this makes the point better:

Say your webserver isn't scaling to more than 500 concurrent users. When you add more load, connections start dropping.

Is it because someone programmed a max_number_of_concurrent_users variable and a throttleExtraAboveThresholdRequests() function?

No.

Yes, humans built the entire stack of the system. Yes every part of it was "programmed", but no this behaviour wasn't programmed intentionally, it is an emergent property arising from system constraints.

Maybe the database connection pool is maxed out and the connections are saturating. Maybe some database configuration setting is too small or the server has too few file handles - whatever.

Whatever the root cause (even though that cause incidentally was implemented by a human if you trace the causal chain back far enough) this behaviour is an almost incidental unintended side effect of that.

A machine learning system is like that, but more so.

An LLM, say, is "parsing" language in some sense, but ascribing what it is doing to human design is pretty indirect.

In a way you typing words at me has in some way been "programmed" into you by every language interaction mankind has had with you.

I guess you could see it that way, but I don't think it's a particularly useful point of view.

In the same way an LLM has been in directly "programmed" via it's model architecture, training algorithm and training data, but we are nowhere near the understanding of the process to be able to consider this "programming" it yet.

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

#194

Post by vundercind »

philipswood wrote: post #193
vundercind wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, these ones. Somebody told the computer to do all those things you just wrote.

Maybe this makes the point better: Say your webserver isn't scaling to more than 500 concurrent users. When you add more load, connections start dropping. Is it because someone programmed a max_number_of_concurrent_users variable and a throttleExtraAboveThresholdRequests() function? No. Yes, humans built the entire stack of the system. Yes every part of it was "programmed", but no this behaviour wasn't programmed int…

This is different from a bug or hitting an unknown limitation—the selling point of this was “it makes shit up” and they went “yeah, cool, let’s have it speak for us”.

Its behavior incorporates randomness and is unpredictable and hard to keep within bounds on purpose and they decided to tell a computer to follow that unpredictable instruction set and place it in a position of speaking for the company, without a human in between. They shouldn’t have done that if they didn’t want to end up in this sort of position.

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

#197

Post by lawlessone »

denlekke wrote: post #173
kazinator wrote: post #120

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.)

i imagine that paying out would set a precedent or provide future discoverable evidence that they want to avoid. fighting (and winning) might have allowed them to continue their chat bot system without needing to change anything.

I think this has backfired enormously then. Wouldn't this case set a precedent?

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

#198

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Zak wrote: post #188
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd normally expect a TV ad to be authorized to make offers. You wouldn't normally expect an AI chatbot to be authorized to make offers. Its purpose is to try to answer common questions and it has been widely covered in popular media that they hallucinate etc.

I disagree. I expect any credible offer a company makes in an advertisement, on its website, using a chatbot, or through a customer service agent to be authorized by the company. Surely a corporation with lots of resources knows better than to program a chatbot to make fake offers; they'd get sued. And they did get sued. Next time maybe they'll make sure software they connect to their website is more reliable.

> Surely a corporation with lots of resources knows better than to program a chatbot to make fake offers; they'd get sued.

They didn't program it to do that, it's a characteristic of the technology that it makes mistakes. Which is fine as the public learns not to blindly trust its answers. It seems silly to assume that people won't be able to figure that out. People are capable of learning how new things work.

This is like the people who set the cruise control in their car when it first came out and then climbed into the back of the car to take a nap. That's not how it works and the technology isn't in a state where anybody knows how to do better.

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

#199

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Scarblac wrote: post #191
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd normally expect a TV ad to be authorized to make offers. You wouldn't normally expect an AI chatbot to be authorized to make offers. Its purpose is to try to answer common questions and it has been widely covered in popular media that they hallucinate etc.

> Its purpose is to try to answer common questions Yes. And therefore people should be able to assume that the answers are correct. Some people have heard of ChatGPT, and some of those have heard that they hallucinate, sure. But that's still not that many people. And they don't know that a question answering chat bot like this is the same technology!

> And therefore people should be able to assume that the answers are correct.

Why is that a necessary requirement? Something can be useful without it being perfect.

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

#200

Post by Zak »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #198
Zak wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I expect any credible offer a company makes in an advertisement, on its website, using a chatbot, or through a customer service agent to be authorized by the company. Surely a corporation with lots of resources knows better than to program a chatbot to make fake offers; they'd get sued. And they did get sued. Next time maybe they'll make sure software they connect to their website is more reliable.

> Surely a corporation with lots of resources knows better than to program a chatbot to make fake offers; they'd get sued. They didn't program it to do that, it's a characteristic of the technology that it makes mistakes. Which is fine as the public learns not to blindly trust its answers. It seems silly to assume that people won't be able to figure that out. People are capable of learning how new things work. This i…

I agree with your cruise control analogy in a sense, but I think it's Air Canada that's misusing the technology, not the customer. If they try to replace customer service agents with chatbots that lie, they need to be prepared to pay for the results. I'm glad they're not allowed to use such unreliable, experimental technologies in their airplanes (737 Max notwithstanding).

There's absolutely a technology available to make a chatbot that won't tell lies: connect a simple text classifier to a human-curated knowledge base.

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