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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

#341

Post by JoshTriplett »

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-…

> 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'm trying to interact with a company and they direct me to a chatbot, I expect to get useful help 0% of the time, because if help was available via a mechanism on their site I would already have found it. I expect a chatbot to stall me as long as possible before either conceding that I need a human's assistance or telling me some further hoop to jump through to reach a real human.

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

#342

Post by dataflow »

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-…

> then what's the point of using the chat bot in the first place?

The point is quite literally to make you give up trying to contact customer service and just pay them money, while getting their legal obligations as close to a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose situation as possible. That's not the mysterious part. The mysterious part is, why did they even let this drag into court for such a small sum?!

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

#343

Post by ssnistfajen »

Aachen wrote: post #333
ssnistfajen wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the outcome is favourable to the customer who was misled, and since Canada is a Common Law country, this ruling will establish a precedent for future corporate negligence with their chatbots in Canada.

Is there a country where no precedent is set by court rulings? It seems a little weird to be able to (and also practically do) rule differently in the same situation

Civil/Continental Law jurisdictions AKA the actual world-wide (excl. Anglosphere) norm for legal systems, do not automatically follow precedent rulings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)#Origi...

They may consider precedent rulings as factors in the decision, but those earlier rulings themselves do not automatically become law for all future cases on the same subject.

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

#345

Post by alexxys »

jerpint wrote: post #311
TechSquidTV wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, RAG can't provide such guarantees. Moreover, even if the correct answer is printed somewhere, LLM+RAG still may produce wrong answer. Example from MS Copilot with GPT-4: https://sl.bing.net/ct6wwRjzkPc It claims that OnePlus 6 has 6.4-inch display, but all linked pages actually claim that it's 6.28. Display resolution and aspect ratio are also wrong in the response.

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

#346

Post by Aachen »

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 article doesn't say (imo an omission), but I assume the argument wasn't that level of stupid

More likely, they blamed a third party vendor that developed, configured, or hosts the bot

Which sounds like a similar situation to when your taxi breaks due to a mechanic's shoddy work: it's not the passenger's fault that your mechanic sucked, you were contracted to get them from A to B and may be on the hook if you stated you'd get them there on time. Here, it's not the user's fault that the chat bot was shoddy and stated something that they now don't want to fulfil. If AirCan wants to blame their vendor, they can go right ahead but this person has a right to this reduced flight price independently of whether AirCan gets the money from their vendor

But explaining all that instead of saying "haha they claimed the chat bot is an independent entity!" probably gets shared less (it's yesterday's top comment after all) and thus fewer conversions from website readers into subscribers

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

#347

Post by astrange »

ryandrake wrote: post #269
SuperNinKenDo wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because they felt confident they could set a precedent would be my guess. Of course the argument is absurd, but this is exactly where companies like this would love to go. Virtually free support staff that incur the company absolutely no liability whatsoever.

Maybe companies are so used to their $multimillion dollar legal teams winning against broke Average Joes that their legal departments are starting to just assume that it will always happen and that all court precedents are going to be favorable. They've been sniffing their own farts for so long they think it's fresh air.

If you sue a company in small claims having an expensive legal team doesn't help them that much.

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

#348

Post by astrange »

data-ottawa wrote: post #337
Invictus0 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything except "there will not be new jobs". There will most definitely be new jobs.

Like what? AI is cool, but the spoils are going to go to staggeringly few people and in most of the West there are no real safety nets for people to fall on. If I lost my job tomorrow to AI then any desk job I aim for might be gone in another 2-3 years, before I even finish retraining. Any content creation is going to be flooded out and most creators don't even make any money even today. It's a marketing role with st…

> AI is cool, but the spoils are going to go to staggeringly few people

They appear to mainly be going to Nvidia investors, which is basically anyone with a retirement account.

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

#349

Post by makeitdouble »

tialaramex wrote: post #336
makeitdouble wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A clear "paper" trail. What is described here do happen when employees send mails with explicit promises, but gets harder when only the company has proof of the exchange (recording of the call). Chatbots bridge that gap.

Some people do record calls to companies. I choose to understand "Calls may be recorded" as permission and say "Thank you", even if perhaps that's not always how it was intended. When calling small very sketchy companies (such as my last landlord before I bought somewhere to live) I ask for permission and hang up if they refuse. Oh you don't want your words recorded? Fine, you're getting a letter, hope you weren't in…

Yes. iOS and default android are really doing a disservice by blocking call recording when in this day and age most real phone calls are done towards corporations or non private settings.

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

#350

Post by astrange »

kevin_b_er wrote: post #259
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

The purpose of AI, and the entire drive of investment in it, is to eliminate labor costs. There's no other purpose. It is not to advance science or make a better world, it is to make money. That money comes by the expense of the many and the gain of a few. And there will not be new jobs to replace the ones lost. There's no more "learn to code!". They're there to replace all jobs possible, make a more unequal society,…

Automation improvements increase employment/wages by increasing productivity. Conversely not doing it reduces them, because you become less competitive vs other countries that are doing it.
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