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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

#411

Post by Zak »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #398
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…

> 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 b…

It's all in how it's presented and should not be up to the customer or end-user to understand how technology running on the company's server, which might be changed at any time might behave unreliably.

I expect something that's presented as customer service not to lie to me about the rebate policy. As long as what it says is plausible, I expect the company to be prepared to cover the cost of any mistakes, especially if the airline only discovers the mistake after I've paid them and taken a flight. Compensating customers for certain types of errors is a normal cost of doing business for airlines, and the $800 CAD this incident cost the airline is not an exorbitant amount. The safety valve here is that judges and juries do test against whether a reasonable person would believe a stated offer or policy; I can't trick a chatbot into offering me a billion dollars for nothing and get a court to hold a company to it.

If Ford presents a chatbot as entertainment and makes it really clear at the start of a session that it doesn't guarantee the factual accuracy of responses, there's no problem. If they present it as informational and don't make a statement like that, or hide it in fine print, then it says something like "the 2024 Mustang Ecoboost has more horsepower than the Chevrolet Corvette and burns less gas than the Toyota Prius", they should be on the hook for false advertising to the customer and unfair competition against Chevrolet and Toyota.

Similarly, if Bing or Google presents a chatbot as an alternative to their search engine for finding information on the internet, and it says "Zak's photography website is full of CSAM", I'm going to sue them for libel.

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

#412

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Zak wrote: post #411
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

It's all in how it's presented and should not be up to the customer or end-user to understand how technology running on the company's server, which might be changed at any time might behave unreliably. I expect something that's presented as customer service not to lie to me about the rebate policy. As long as what it says is plausible, I expect the company to be prepared to cover the cost of any mistakes, especially…

> The safety valve here is that judges and juries do test against whether a reasonable person would believe a stated offer or policy; I can't trick a chatbot into offering me a billion dollars for nothing and get a court to hold a company to it.

Sure, but a billion people could each trick it into offering them $100, which would bankrupt the airline.

> they should be on the hook for false advertising to the customer and unfair competition against Chevrolet and Toyota.

But all you're really doing is requiring everyone to put a banner on everything that says "for entertainment purposes only". Because if something like that gets them out of the liability then that's what everybody is going to do. And if it doesn't then you're effectively banning the technology, because "have it not make stuff up" isn't a thing they know how to do.

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

#413

Post by rideontime »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #401
l33t7332273 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They didn't program it to do that, it's a characteristic of the technology that it makes mistakes It sounds like you meant to say that they didn’t _intentionally_ program it to do that. They didn’t find the system under a rock and unleash it on the world; they made it.

Most of these companies didn't make it, they took an existing one and fed it some additional information about their company.

So what?

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

#414

Post by alright2565 »

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…

Apologies for the off-topic reply here, but they've just fixed the ipv6 issues with gtlib by removing the AAAA records.

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

#415

Post by astrange »

SuperNinKenDo wrote: post #403
astrange wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Could you elaborate?

Mostly all the expensive procedures aren't allowed, there isn't a jury so it moves faster, and in some places lawyers aren't allowed in court even to represent a business.

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

#416

Post by Zak »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #412
Zak wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all in how it's presented and should not be up to the customer or end-user to understand how technology running on the company's server, which might be changed at any time might behave unreliably. I expect something that's presented as customer service not to lie to me about the rebate policy. As long as what it says is plausible, I expect the company to be prepared to cover the cost of any mistakes, especially…

> The safety valve here is that judges and juries do test against whether a reasonable person would believe a stated offer or policy; I can't trick a chatbot into offering me a billion dollars for nothing and get a court to hold a company to it. Sure, but a billion people could each trick it into offering them $100, which would bankrupt the airline. > they should be on the hook for false advertising to the customer a…

Courts probably aren't going to enforce any promise of money for nothing or responses prompted by obvious trickery, but they might enforce promises of discounts, and are very likely to enforce promises of rebates as the court in this case did.

If that means companies can't use chatbots to replace customer service agents yet, so be it.

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

#417

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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 not like human call center staff has never given anyone wrong information, or cost companies money in fines and lawsuits.

If a company representative told me in writing (perhaps via email support) that I could claim a refund retroactively, and that turned out to not be their policy, I would still expect the company to honor what I was told in the email.

Phone calls are difficult more because there is no record of what was said. But if I had a recording of the phone call... I'm not actually sure what I would expect to happen. It's just so socially unusual to record phone calls.

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

#418

Post by citizenpaul »

eru wrote: post #357
citizenpaul wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that hallucinations will cost money in fines & lawsuits. Sure. They are now out about $600. They probably already laid off 500+ customer service jobs costing conservatively 30k a year each. Not including mgmt,training,health,ect. I don't think it will make a difference to the ivory tower C levels. We will just all get used to a once again lower quality help/product. Another great "enshitification" wave of the future…

> Another "new normal" How come anything that is "new normal" is never good? If it allows them to reduce costs (and there's enough competition to force them to pass that on as reduced prices), I'm fairly happy with a new normal. See also how air travel in general used to be a lot more glamorous, but also a lot more expensive.

Yeah they pass those cost saving right onto record corporate profits for the last 20 years...

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

#419

Post by joecool1029 »

alright2565 wrote: post #414
joecool1029 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Apologies for the off-topic reply here, but they've just fixed the ipv6 issues with gtlib by removing the AAAA records.

Thanks, I thought I would die of old age before that got resolved.

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

#420

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Zak wrote: post #416
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The safety valve here is that judges and juries do test against whether a reasonable person would believe a stated offer or policy; I can't trick a chatbot into offering me a billion dollars for nothing and get a court to hold a company to it. Sure, but a billion people could each trick it into offering them $100, which would bankrupt the airline. > they should be on the hook for false advertising to the customer a…

Courts probably aren't going to enforce any promise of money for nothing or responses prompted by obvious trickery, but they might enforce promises of discounts, and are very likely to enforce promises of rebates as the court in this case did. If that means companies can't use chatbots to replace customer service agents yet, so be it.

> Courts probably aren't going to enforce any promise of money for nothing or responses prompted by obvious trickery, but they might enforce promises of discounts, and are very likely to enforce promises of rebates as the court in this case did.

But what does that matter? So someone posts on Reddit how to trick the chatbot into offering a rebate and then 75% of their customers have done it by the time they realize what's going on and now they're out of business.

> If that means companies can't use chatbots to replace customer service agents yet, so be it.

You're still not articulating any way to distinguish "customer service" from any other functioning chatbot. A general purpose chatbot will answer customer service questions, so how does this not just ban all of them?

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