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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

#391

Post by behringer »

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…

I think you're underestimating the quality of customer support. People are going to be out there testing every flaw in the support system, staffed or unstaffed. LLMs have no hope.

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

#392

Post by [deleted] »

erhaetherth wrote: post #379
atoav wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. Saying "thing X should not fail" is factually incorrect, when you called because thing X failed. However I would not expect an airline customer support to make up a completely fictional flight that has never existed. Maybe they could confuse flights or read a number wrong, but making one up?

Humans won't fabricate too much but when confronted with yes/no questions and they have a 50-50 shot of being right and any blowback will likely be on someone else....they'll answer whatever to get you out of their hair. Case in point, I asked my bank if they had any FX conversion fees or markup. Guy said no. I asked if there was any markup on the spread. Said no. Guess what? They absolutely mark up that spread. Thei…

[deleted]

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

#393

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> 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 bot in the first place?

Because you can ask it a question in natural language and it will give you an answer you can type into a search engine to see if it's real. Before you didn't know the name of the thing you were looking for, now you do.

> If you can't trust it 99% of the time, or if the company says "use this, but nothing it says should be taken as fact", then why would i waste my time?

The rate at which it makes stuff up isn't 99%, is the point. For common questions, better than half of the answers have some basis in reality.

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

#394

Post by wlonkly »

subarctic wrote: post #374
wlonkly wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One nice touch about BC's CRT is that neither side is allowed to be represented by lawyers without specific approval by the tribunal.

That's interesting. What does that mean in practice, do they send people that have a lot of legal training and experience, but aren't bar members?

Honestly not sure, but with only $800 at risk I can't imagine them even sending a paralegal.

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

#395

Post by gwbas1c »

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-…

My internet went down and I could only get a chat bot on the Web site or a hang up on the support line.

After the "estimated fix by ETA" came and went, I reported my ISP to the FCC. That resulted in a quick follow up from a real human.

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

#396

Post by AnthonyMouse »

gregmac wrote: post #215
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

It isn't supposed to be a company representative, it's supposed to be a chatbot.

If Microsoft puts ChatGPT on Twitter so people could try it, and everybody knows that it's ChatGPT, and then it started offering companies free Windows licenses, why should they have to honor that? It's obvious why it might do that but the purpose of letting people use it wasn't so it could authorize anything.

If the company holds a conference where it allows third party conference speakers to give talks, which everybody knows are third parties and not company employees, should the guest speakers be able to speak for the company? Why would that accomplish anything other than the elimination of guest speakers?

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

#397

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ado__dev wrote: post #222
Zak wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The result would be a de facto ban on AI chatbots No, the result would be a de facto ban on using them as a replacement for customer service agents. I support that for the time being since AI chatbots can't actually do that job yet because we don't know how to keep them from lying. They could put a disclaimer on it of course. To be sufficiently truthful, the disclaimer would need to be front and center and say some…

And if I saw that disclaimer, I wouldn't use the tool. What's the point if you can't trust what it says. Just let me talk to a human that can solve my issue.

> What's the point if you can't trust what it says. Just let me talk to a human that can solve my issue.

That's the point of it -- you don't have to wait on hold for a human to get your answer, and you could plausibly both receive it and validate it yourself sooner than you could get through to a human.

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

#398

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Zak wrote: post #205
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 No, the result would be a de facto ban on using them as a replacement for customer service agents. I support that for the time being since AI chatbots can't actually do that job yet because we don't know how to keep them from lying. They could put a disclaimer on it of course. To be sufficiently truthful, the disclaimer would need to be front and center and say some…

> No, the result would be a de facto ban on using them as a replacement for customer service agents.

But what does that even mean? If Ford trains a chatbot to answer questions about cars purely for entertainment purposes, or to get people excited about cars, a customer could still use it for "customer service" just by asking it questions about their car, which it might very well be able to answer. But it would also be capable of making up warranty terms etc., so you've just banned that thing and anything like it.

> I support that for the time being since AI chatbots can't actually do that job yet because we don't know how to keep them from lying.

It's pretty unlikely we could ever keep them from lying. We can't even get humans to do that. The best you could do is keep them on a script, which is the exact thing that makes people hate existing human customer service reps who can't help them because it isn't in the script.

> To be sufficiently truthful, the disclaimer would need to be front and center and say something like "The chat bot lies sometimes. It is not authorized to make any commitments on behalf of the company no matter what it says. Always double-check anything it tells you."

Which is exactly what's about to start happening, if that actually works. But that's as pointless as cookie banners and "this product is known to the State of California to cause cancer".

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

#399

Post by tqi »

erhaetherth wrote: post #382
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?

My read from the article was that because the chatbot is a third party company, they were liable for the error. Which I assume is the same argument they would have made if chat support was outsourced to some outside firm. Of course, either way it is an idiotic argument.

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

#400

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ado__dev wrote: post #219
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What would it take to disabuse you of that notion now that your expectations have been observed to be in conflict with reality?

What you're describing isn't what you expect, it's what you wish were the case even though you know it isn't.

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