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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

#311

Post by jerpint »

TechSquidTV wrote: post #296
steveBK123 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think people underestimate the amount of imagined LLM use cases that require accurate responses. To the point that hallucinations will cost money in fines & lawsuits. This is a new frontier in short sighted customer service staffing (non-staffing in this case). The people who are on the frontline communicating with customers can convert unhappy customers to repeat customers, or into ex-customers. There's a few…

With RAG it's entirely possible to essentially eliminate 100% of hallucinations, given you are ok with responding with "I don't know" once in a while. These situations are likely coming from poorly implemented chatbot, or they decided that "I dont know" was not acceptable, and really that should be a queue to send you to a real human.

There are no guarantees with RAG either, and RAG only works when the answer to the question is already printed out somewhere explicitly in the text, otherwise it’s definitely prone to hallucinate

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

#312

Post by jowea »

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.

It really seems absurd because even if it was, isn't Air Canada responsible? Imagine it was a human employee who made the same mistake, surely it's still Air Canada's problem?

Anyway, let's take a moment to thank Air Canada for this progressive stand for the individual legal autonomy of artificial persons.

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

#313

Post by nicbou »

morkalork wrote: post #240

What are the chances that companies take the easy way out and slap a EULA on the chatbots like "by engaging in conversation with our automated agent you agree to "?

One thing I love about German law is that lopsided contracts are generally not valid.

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

#314

Post by bpye »

joecool1029 wrote: post #293
CamelCaseName wrote: post #253

The worst case for these airlines is always just a refund for whatever money they took in the first place. Someone could make a killing making a fake airline, taking payments for flights, and then cancelling every single flight and only refunding the people who fight back hard enough.

> Someone could make a killing making a fake airline, taking payments for flights, and then cancelling every single flight and only refunding the people who fight back hard enough. They did, it's called Air Canada. I was scammed out of Japan tickets by them during COVID, they have still not refunded me and they expired the credit for the tickets. I have tried every customer support avenue to no avail. It's a scam air…

Canada introduced new regulations in response to cases like yours [0].

It required some persistence but Air Canada did abide by the regulations in my case last year. My flight from Vancouver to Toronto was delayed by a couple hours and I missed the connection to Edinburgh. They, as required, booked replacement flights via Air France (not a partner airline) as the next Air Canada or partner airline route would have departed more than 9 hours late.

[0] - https://rppa-appr.ca/eng/right/flight-delays-and-cancellatio...

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

#315

Post by OnionBlender »

I wonder if companies will just show a disclaimer first to avoid responsibility.

"This chatbot is provided for entertainment purposes only. If you trust anything it says, you only have yourself to blame. Reading this message waives your right to sue us."

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

#316

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

It's a start, but there should be some kind of general Algorithmic Integrity law.

Hallucinating chatbots, automated YT copyright strikes, Insta accusations of bothood because you clicked too fast, Amazon nuking author accounts because it gets confused, self-driving cars that don't self-drive - and so on. They're all the same problem.

At best these are large corporations automating processes with unacceptably poor reliability. At worst, they're hiding deceptive and manipulative practices behind algorithms so they can claim they're not responsible for damage caused.

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

#318

Post by MintPaw »

What actually happened? It said they could the refund window was 90 days, but why didn't it work?

"But when he applied for a refund, Air Canada said bereavement rates did not apply to completed travel and pointed to the bereavement section of the company’s website."

Does this mean they actually took flight with no issues, but then requested a refund afterwards because it was for a funeral?

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

#319

Post by Aeolun »

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

Our company is on the way to ‘ease’ the work for the customer by having them write a whole story to replace 4 buttons. We’ll have the AI figure out which of the four buttons need to be pressed based on the text.

I keep wondering how this could possibly be superior to just showing the 4 buttons…

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

#320

Post by mattlondon »

ado__dev wrote: post #246

If I am trying to interact with a company and they direct me to 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, or if anything the chatbot tells me is non-…

This is true of all LLMs: you cannot trust a single thing they say. Everything needs to be checked - from airline fee information to code.

I expect we'll see this sort of thing a lot more in the future, and probably a bit of a subsequent reversal of all of the sackings of humans once the issues (... and legal liability!) becomes clearer to people.

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