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Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up

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Re: Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up

#131
I think this article's full import is not being properly processed yet by a lot of people. The stock market is in an absolute AI frenzy. But this article trashes one of the current boom's biggest supposed markets. If AIs can't be put in contact with customers without exposing the company to an expected liability cost greater than the cost of a human customer representative, one of their major supposed use cases is gone, and that means the money for that use case is gone too. There's probably halo effects in a lot of other uses as well.

Now, in the medium or long term, I expect there to be AIs that will be able to do this sort of thing just fine. As I like to say I expect future AIs will not "be" LLMs but merely use LLMs as one of their component parts, and the design as a whole will in fact be able to accurately and reliably relay corporate policies as a result. But the stock market is not currently priced based on "AIs will be pretty awesome in 2029", they're priced on "AIs are going to be pretty awesome in July".

LLMs are a huge step forward, but they really aren't suitable for a lot of uses people are trying to put them to in the near term. They don't really "know" things, they're really, really good at guessing them. Now, I don't mean this in the somewhat tedious "what is knowing anyhow" sense, I mean that they really don't have any sort of "facts" in them, just really, really good language skills. I fully expect that people are working on this and the problem will be solved in some manner and we will be able to say that there is an AI design that "knows" things. For instance, see this: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphageometry-an-olymp... That's in the direction of what I'm talking about; this system does not just babble things that "look" or "sound" like geometry proofs, it "knows" it is doing geometry proofs. This is not quite ready to be fed a corporate policy document, but it is in that direction. But that's got some work to be done yet.

(And again, I'm really not interested in another rehash of what "knows" really means. In this specific case I'm speaking of the vector from "a language model" and "a language model + something else like a symbolic engine" as described in that post, where I'm simply defining the latter as "knowing" more about geometry than the former.)

Re: Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up

#132

Here's the real punchline: > Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt's case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate. Here's a glimpse into our Kafka-esque AI-powered future: every corporate lawyer is now making sure any customer service request will be gated by a chatbot containing a disclaimer li…

If that is such a perfect way to avoid getting sued, why don't they put that on every page of their website and train all of their customer service staff to say that when they talk to customers?

Well, if the information on the website is too inaccurate to trust then it is also too inaccurate for purposes of contract. The logical next step is to say that all contracts made with chatbots are unenforceable as they lack any trustworthy meeting of the minds.

Re: Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up

#133
post #4

> "Air Canada argues it cannot be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants, or representatives—including a chatbot," Rivers wrote. "It does not explain why it believes that is the case" or "why the webpage titled 'Bereavement travel' was inherently more trustworthy than its chatbot." This is very reasonable-- AI or not, companies can't expect consumers to know which parts of their digital e…

This line of argument is crazy and infuriating. "Air Canada essentially argued, 'the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions,' a court order said." Do they expect people to sue the chatbot? Are they also implying that people have to sue individual agents if they cause a problem?

If they could reasonably expect to be able to hire people who would agree to accept all liability incurred during their work for the company, they absolutely would.

Same with chatbots. Even better, because once it's "trained", you don't have to pay it.

There's a few instances of expecting digital entities to shoulder the entirety of legal liability here in the last few years; DAOs are another example of this in the crypto space.

Re: Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up

#134
post #4

> "Air Canada argues it cannot be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants, or representatives—including a chatbot," Rivers wrote. "It does not explain why it believes that is the case" or "why the webpage titled 'Bereavement travel' was inherently more trustworthy than its chatbot." This is very reasonable-- AI or not, companies can't expect consumers to know which parts of their digital e…

Forget about digital experiences for a moment. Forget entirely about chatbots. > Air Canada argues it cannot be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants, or representatives That includes EMPLOYEES. So they tried to argue that their employees can lie to your face to get you to buy a ticket under false pretense and then refuse to honor the promised terms? That's absolutely fucked.

I can sort of see it. On the one hand, it's reasonable to hold them accountable when an employee gives you the wrong discount. But if an employee, on their last day at work, decides to offer the next person calling all of the seats on a single flight for just $10, I think we'd all agree that it would be unreasonable to expect the airline to honor that offer.

It's the degree of misinformation that's relevant.

Re: Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up

#136

Good. If you use a tool that does not give the correct answers you should be held liable for the mistake. The takeaway is, you better vet your tool. If the amount of money you loses from mistakes with the tool is less than the money you saved using it then you make money, if not, you may want to reconsider that cost saving measure.

What if the company responds that they don't know how to vet the tool?

After all, we're still not 100% sure how LLMs make their decisions in what they string together as output, so the company's not _technically_ lying.

Re: Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up

#137
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet if we removed the requirement to get a lawyer and file a lawsuit that those behaviors would vanish real quick, if all you had to do as the wronged consumer was report to an authority that Company X is doing business dishonestly.

You are probably not wrong, however take note that this is exactly the line of thinking that led to the DMCA. Beware the law of unintended consequences. To misquote you. "I bet if we removed the requirement to get a lawyer and file a lawsuit that those behaviors would vanish real quick, if all you had to do as the wronged copyright holder was report to an authority(the hosting service) that Company X is infringing on…

It also led to things like easy small claims court, consumer protection agencies and DPOs which protect consumers against corporations here in Europe without them having to shell out thousands of euros for lawyers and court cases.

Re: Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up

#138

Here's the real punchline: > Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt's case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate. Here's a glimpse into our Kafka-esque AI-powered future: every corporate lawyer is now making sure any customer service request will be gated by a chatbot containing a disclaimer li…

If that is such a perfect way to avoid getting sued, why don't they put that on every page of their website and train all of their customer service staff to say that when they talk to customers?

Because you would choose someone else for things that really matter to you, probably the same person you would chose in that kind of scenario anyway. Eg. for my initial llc where I was single employee, I didn't care about my accounting basically saying in the contract "we ll do our best but can't be liable for anything", whereas now that I have bigger llc with many employees I picked (what I perceived) the best option on the market, for a premium price. They take the liability for their work and have insurance.

Re: Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet if we removed the requirement to get a lawyer and file a lawsuit that those behaviors would vanish real quick, if all you had to do as the wronged consumer was report to an authority that Company X is doing business dishonestly.

I think I could price for a few tens of thousands of dollars a service that creates a bunch of such wronged consumers. There are a bunch of homeless people in San Francisco we will represent. To make it easy for someone on the streets to be able to complain, we actually operate as a non-profit that advocates on their behalf for having wronged the company. You could use my service to attack another company on demand,…

This isn't a new business idea. There are law firms that specialize in consumer class action suits, and part of their skillset is finding lots of wronged consumers to represent.

Signing up homeless people by the hundred isn't exactly the gold standard of what these firms do, but it's not a million miles removed.

Re: Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The story is about a Canadian airline, in a Canadian civil resolution tribunal.

And? Using American technology, huffing American propaganda, voting for American political ideals. I'm Canadian and I see us as no different from Americans. We are Americans.
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