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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

#381

Post by erhaetherth »

potatolicious wrote: post #367
dataflow wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?!

> "The mysterious part is, why did they even let this drag into court for such a small sum?!" Because most people wouldn't bother taking it to court. If they rolled over and paid up every time their chatbot made a mistake, that gets expensive, and teaches customers that they can easily be compensated if the chatbot screws up. If they fight it tooth and nail and drag it all the way to court, it teaches customers that…

Well...they lost, and now it made the news. Are they going to keep the chatbot? Is the judge going to so lenient next time, now that there's precedent of wrongdoing?

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

#382

Post by erhaetherth »

tqi wrote: post #370

I don't see why AI is particularly germane to this case- if a human support rep from a third party contractor made the same statement I assume AC would have tried the same nonsense?

They're not liable for the things that come out of their employees' mouths?

Maybe my flight tickets aren't valid either because I foolishly purchased them on aircanada.com and their website is known to have bugs? Or the ticket lady punched the wrong thing into her computer? Or I should have known the plane was going to be overbooked?

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

#383

Post by jowea »

mortenjorck wrote: post #368
kingo55 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judge, I'll refer you to my legal chatbot. I rest my case.

Your selection of generative counsel has been confirmed. Please do not navigate away from this page while the trial runs. You will receive a notification when the verdict has been reached. This may take up to a minute.

Thank you for the best 2 paragraph cyberpunk story.

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

#384

Post by erhaetherth »

Aachen wrote: post #346
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 stat…

If they dragged the customer into court, they already screwed up.

They should have paid the customer immediately and then took it up with their vendor. If they want to take their vendor to court, they can do that separately.

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

#385

Post by erhaetherth »

frabjoused wrote: post #364

The header "Company claimed its chatbot ‘was responsible for its own actions’ when giving wrong information about bereavement fare" is such a great example of an article giving misleading information to up sensationalism. Later on it's explained "Air Canada argued that despite the error, the chatbot was a “separate legal entity” and thus was responsible for its actions." That's a completely different argument and muc…

Those 2 sentences are identical? Unless they meant the company that made the chatbot was a separate legal entity. If the chatbot itself is a "separate legal entity" then that's basically saying the same thing.

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

#386

Post by steveBK123 »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #369
wongarsu wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like human call center staff has never given anyone wrong information, or cost companies money in fines and lawsuits. The bar LLMs have to clear to beat the average front line support operations isn't that high, as your own experience shows. And compared to a large force of badly paid humans with high turnover, LLMs are pretty consistent and easy to train to an adequate level. They won't beat great costumer…

To me that’s totally fine. I don’t even particularly care whether the LLM is better or not. The only thing they really matters is if you are gonna use that LLM, when it inevitably messes up you don’t get to claim that it wasn’t your fault because computers are hard and AI is an emerging field. IDGAF. Pay up. The fact that you dabble in emerging technologies doesn’t give you any excuse to provide lesser services

Right whether you employ a person or some software which lies, the liability should be the same.

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

#387

Post by steveBK123 »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #327
wongarsu wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like human call center staff has never given anyone wrong information, or cost companies money in fines and lawsuits. The bar LLMs have to clear to beat the average front line support operations isn't that high, as your own experience shows. And compared to a large force of badly paid humans with high turnover, LLMs are pretty consistent and easy to train to an adequate level. They won't beat great costumer…

Sure, but there is such a thing as “the human element”. Humans aren’t perfect, and that is the expectation. That is not the same case with computers. And especially for something where it’s just pulling data from an internal system. There is absolutely no reason to invent made up information and saying “well humans do it all the time” is just an excuse.

Yes, further, expectations wise..

On the phone with a customer service rep, I might understand a little wishy washy answer, slip of the tongue or slightly inaccurate statement. I've never really had a rep lie to me, usually its just I don't knows & them escalation as needed.

There is something about the written word from a company that makes it feel more like "binding statement".

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

#388

Post by steveBK123 »

alexxys wrote: post #345
jerpint wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's funny it seems to have a lot of trouble extracting tabular data, which arguably is one of the things I hear people trying to do with it..

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

#389

Post by steveBK123 »

wongarsu wrote: post #308
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…

It's not like human call center staff has never given anyone wrong information, or cost companies money in fines and lawsuits. The bar LLMs have to clear to beat the average front line support operations isn't that high, as your own experience shows. And compared to a large force of badly paid humans with high turnover, LLMs are pretty consistent and easy to train to an adequate level. They won't beat great costumer…

It's still way too easy to send LLMs into a complete tangent of rambling incoherently, opening yourself up to the LLM making written statements to customers you really don't want.

I recently asked some LLMs "How many gallons in a mile?" and got some very verbose answers, which turned into feats of short story short stories when I refined to "How many gallons of milk in a mile?"

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

#390

Post by ssnistfajen »

Aachen wrote: post #363
ssnistfajen wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> world-wide (excl. Anglosphere) Not quite that simple. The word we use is jurisprudentie but it means the same. Opening up the Dutch Wikipedia article and clicking on the English version of the article with thst name, you end up with "Case law, also used interchangeably with common law, is a law that is based on precedents" I dove into this when I first heard of the difference between continental law and common law,…

Precendent rulings and legislations are separate things in civil law countries. Not separating them is how the U.S. got the Roe v. Wade fiasco.

No two court cases are completely identical. Precedents are an important reference but they themselves do not automatically decide the outcome in civil law jurisdictions

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