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

bc.ctvnews.ca

211–220 of 434 posts

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

#212
post #208

Quite a sensible judgement, it seems. Pretty outrageous for the airline to try to claim the chatbot was its own legal entity.

They want to have their cake and eat it too. To use AI to get rid of paying for labor, but also not assume any of the risks that go along with it.

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

#215
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, because nobody knows how to get them not to make stuff up.

If, instead of a chatbot, this was about incompetent support reps that lied constantly, would you make the same argument? "We can't hire dirt-cheap low-quality labor because as company representatives we have to do what they say we'll do. It's so unfair"

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

#217
post #208

Quite a sensible judgement, it seems. Pretty outrageous for the airline to try to claim the chatbot was its own legal entity.

They want to have their cake and eat it too. To use AI to get rid of paying for labor, but also not assume any of the risks that go along with it.

At least they could claim it as a training issue.

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

#218
post #216

I just can't believe it took a lawsuit to get an airline to fork over a few hundred bucks on something that was obviously their fault.

Yeah; this should've been well within some second-tier customer service manager's discretionary refund budget. Instead they've got a precedent-setting ruling that makes the chatbot a huge liability.

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

#219
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.

I would expect that if I was talking to an official tool that the company provides to interact with to be authorized to give me information (including discounts and offers) to be accurate and true.
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