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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

#201

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Zak wrote: post #200
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If they try to replace customer service agents with chatbots that lie, they need to be prepared to pay for the results.

The result would be a de facto ban on AI chatbots, because nobody knows how to get them not to make stuff up.

> I'm glad they're not allowed to use such unreliable, experimental technologies in their airplanes (737 Max notwithstanding).

If you use unreliable technology in an airplane, it falls out of the sky and everybody dies. If you use it in a chatbot, the customer can e.g. go to the company's website to apply for the discount it said exists and discover that it isn't there, and then be mildly frustrated in the way that customers commonly are when a company's technology is imperfect. It's not the same thing.

> 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.

But then it can only answer questions in the knowledge base, and customers might prefer an answer which is right 75% of the time and can be verified either way in five minutes than to have to wait on hold to talk to a human being because the less capable chatbot couldn't answer their question and the more capable one was effectively banned by the government's liability rules.

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

#202

Post by lolc »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #187
easyThrowaway wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea about the US but this very same case was tested in France and some part of Germany in the late 90s when some PayTVs (Sky or Canal+, can't remember) tried to cancel multiple subscriptions offered with an extremely aggressive pricing by some of their agents. Courts concluded that the signed agreements superseded the official pricing and they had to offer the service for the entire length of the original subscri…

The difference is that was a signed agreement. This chatbot merely said something was possible, no legally binding agreement occured.

Where I live, "meeting of the minds" is necessary for a contract. Written or not. In this case, that meeting didn't happen. Due to the bullshit generator employed by Air Canada.

So there was no contract but a consumed flight. The court has to retroactively figure out a reasonable contract in such cases. That Air Canada couldn't just apply the reduced rate once they learned of their wrong communication marks them as incredibly petty.

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

#203

Post by eszed »

danielscrubs wrote: post #110
eszed wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But isnt that the crux of the matter? You buy what consumer reports say, and the reviewers have no way of knowing if it will break down in 3 years. No one rates their gadget after three years so we have a massive blind spot where the best thing is still word of mouth. My parents bought an Miele washing machine, rock solid even after pushing ten years.

Yeah, totally. That's where branding used to be a valuable signal, under the assumption that a company wouldn't deliberately choose to destroy their long-term value. I don't believe that anymore, so I'll place what remains of my trust in reviewers I know are independent (God help us all if it turns out CR is taking kick-backs or something) and figure know more about, say, washing machines than I do.

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

#204

Post by eszed »

pintxo wrote: post #112
eszed wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did not know that! Thanks. Indeed, "family run", depending on where they are in the internal-to-the-family management-transition cycle, is more encouraging to me than "publicly held". ("Private equity" is always and everywhere a huge red flag.)

It's depressing to me that we have to think about those things. I mean, "buyer beware" has always been the case, but it seems like we have to be more wary (or more wary of more factors) than we did a decade or two ago. Or maybe I'm just getting older. I dunno.

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

#205

Post by Zak »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #201
Zak wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If they try to replace customer service agents with chatbots that lie, they need to be prepared to pay for the results. The result would be a de facto ban on AI chatbots, because nobody knows how to get them not to make stuff up. > I'm glad they're not allowed to use such unreliable, experimental technologies in their airplanes (737 Max notwithstanding). If you use unreliable technology in an airplane, it falls out…

> The result would be a de facto ban on AI chatbots

No, the result would be a de facto ban on using them as a replacement for customer service agents. I support that for the time being since AI chatbots can't actually do that job yet because we don't know how to keep them from lying.

They could put a disclaimer on it of course. To be sufficiently truthful, the disclaimer would need to be front and center and say something like "The chat bot lies sometimes. It is not authorized to make any commitments on behalf of the company no matter what it says. Always double-check anything it tells you."

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

#206

Post by bena »

kazinator wrote: post #186
bena wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if they win this, they get to keep the good and ignore the bad. They get to automate a large chunk of their customer service and when the chatbot does something really stupid they can tap on the sign that says "We're not legally bound by our chatbot"

But anything output by your chatbot is no different from something you put onto a billboard, or into a flyer or any other communication. The idea that a discount offered by a chatbot is not valid in the same way as one written on a coupon is nonsensical. Maybe they were thinking, if we spend a bit more money on lawyers, we can try this crapshoot.

Yes, that's what the ruling essentially said.

However, that's not what Air Canada wanted. And I'm not saying they should have won either. Just that, that's what they wanted.

Because if they can ignore the output of the chatbot when they want to, they can gut their customer service department.

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

#207

Post by seba_dos1 »

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.

Of course language models can't be trusted, but it's not the customer's problem to think about chatbot's purpose, how it's implemented and whether it hallucinates or not.
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