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

231–240 of 434 posts

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

#231

Post by tomrod »

dmurray wrote: post #223
Arrath wrote: post #208

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

The guy who bought the Chevy Tahoe for $1 [0] isn't going to get it, though. And that's also perfectly sensible. But at some point we're going to see more cases in the grey area in between. What's the important difference? In both cases I think the result would be the same if the chatbot had been a human. GM doesn't have to honour every promise a sales rep makes, even if that rep is nominally entitled to enter into c…

> GM doesn't have to honour every promise a sales rep makes, even if that rep is nominally entitled to enter into contracts for the company - otherwise someone might agree to sell their whole stock to an accomplice for $1

The law doesn't protect a company in the world you laid out, internal compliance and controls do. A sales rep in a company with bad controls may well do exactly what you laid out.

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

#233

Post by silverquiet »

ado__dev wrote: post #225
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If I am trying to interact with a company and they tell me to use their chatbot, I expect that chatbot to provide me with accurate answers 100% of the time (or to say it can't help me in the event that I ask a question that it's not meant to solve, and connect me to a representative who can). If I have to double-triple check elsewhere to make sure that the chatbot is correct, then what's the point of using the chat b…

This is why I’m a bit vexed by all the hype around LLMs. It reminds me of talking to a friend’s mother who was suffering from dementia - she could have a perfectly lucid conversation with you and then segue into stories that were obviously fictions that existed only within her head. She was a nice lady, but not someone who you would hire to represent your company; she was considered disabled.

Awhile back another commenter called them a “demented Clippy” which about sums them up for me.

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

#234

Post by fbdab103 »

dmurray wrote: post #223
Arrath wrote: post #208

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

The guy who bought the Chevy Tahoe for $1 [0] isn't going to get it, though. And that's also perfectly sensible. But at some point we're going to see more cases in the grey area in between. What's the important difference? In both cases I think the result would be the same if the chatbot had been a human. GM doesn't have to honour every promise a sales rep makes, even if that rep is nominally entitled to enter into c…

I think there is already established case law that a deal can be too-good-to-be-true. If you see a 90" TV on Amazon for $1, even if the order went through, Amazon is within their rights to cancel it as a mistake in pricing.

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

#235

Post by ado__dev »

roncesvalles wrote: post #130
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.

I just don't understand why companies don't use something like Algolia on their KB articles with some careful manual keyword curation. Imagine all the person had to do was type "bereavement" in a search bar and it instantly matched with the bereavement policy. What more does a person need?

Exactly this. I feel like LLMs are great for so many things and have a crap ton of real-world use cases. But for simple FAQs, there's so many better and cheaper solutions out there.

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

#236

Post by ceejayoz »

beambot wrote: post #227
ceejayoz wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Recall when the Chevy dealership's chatbot agreed to sell a Chevy Tahoe for $1... https://www.businessinsider.com/car-dealership-chevrolet-cha...

If Chevy dealerships had $1 bereavement Chevy Tahoes as a normal business practice, I think that one would've gone the other way.

In the Air Canada case, it was a clear good-faith effort to understand the rules of a fare he was legitimately entitled to.

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

#237

Post by DavidSJ »

brentm wrote: 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.

I think they weren't worried about those few hundred bucks so much as precedent resulting in some future liability of millions of dollars when their chatbot misinforms tens of thousands of customers about something.

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

#238

Post by ado__dev »

silverquiet wrote: post #233
ado__dev wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I am trying to interact with a company and they tell me to use their chatbot, I expect that chatbot to provide me with accurate answers 100% of the time (or to say it can't help me in the event that I ask a question that it's not meant to solve, and connect me to a representative who can). If I have to double-triple check elsewhere to make sure that the chatbot is correct, then what's the point of using the chat b…

This is why I’m a bit vexed by all the hype around LLMs. It reminds me of talking to a friend’s mother who was suffering from dementia - she could have a perfectly lucid conversation with you and then segue into stories that were obviously fictions that existed only within her head. She was a nice lady, but not someone who you would hire to represent your company; she was considered disabled. Awhile back another comm…

Yeah totally. LLMs have a lot of awesome use cases. But as chatbots, they need a lot of guardrails, and even then, I'm highly skeptical if they improve the experience over a simple searchable FAQs or docs.

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

#239

Post by metalliqaz »

ndjshe3838 wrote: post #226

I hate the whole attitude the industry has towards AI models, it just seems so sloppy compared to software of the past It’s like “yeah we don’t really know what it’s going to do and it might screw up but whatever just launch it” Really surprised me that so many companies are willing to jump into LLMs without any guarantee that the output won’t be something completely insane

They are salivating at the idea of being able to get humans off their payroll.

The future is mass unemployment with all resources being split between a handful of trillionaires who control the AIs.

Post reply on HN