Live data from Hacker News

"I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1"

twitter.com

331–340 of 403 posts

Re: "I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1"

#331
post #320
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are going to find that they are liable for things they promise. A company representative is just that, and no ToS on a website will help evade that fact. If someone claims to be representing the company, and the company knows, and the interaction is reasonable, the company is on the hook! Just as they would be on the hook, if a human lies, or provides fraudulent information, or makes a deal with someone. Th…

> An example, you get a human to sell you a car for $1. Well, absurd! I've GIVEN away a car for $0. Granted, it needed some work, but it still ran. Some people even pay to have their car taken (e.g. a junker that needs to be towed away). Before you argue that $0 for a perfectly functional new car is unreasonable, I would point out that game shows and sweepstakes routinely give away cars for $0. And I have seen people…

I think game show prizes aren't that great of an example. There's almost always consideration offered by the contestants in that in return for the $0 prize, they sign over the rights to broadcast and use their likeness in the game show. So it's not that the contestant trades $0 for the prize, it's that they trade $0 + some rights, for the prize. The buy-nothing groups also likely have some kind of tax obligation, though the amounts are likely such that they fall within exemptions.

Also, in contract law, 'unusual' and 'unreasonable' have a very large overlap in their venn diagram.

Re: "I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1"

#332

I never understand people who engage with chat bots as customer service. I find them deeply upsetting, not one step above the phone robot on Vodafone support: "press 1 for internet problems" ... "press 2 to be transferred to a human representative". Only problem is going through like 7 steps until I can reach that human, then waiting some 30 minutes until the line is free. But it's the only approach that gets anythin…

One of the car dealers near me purchased a chatbot for their site, which I briefly interacted with the other day out of curiosity. Unlike the one in the article, this one denied being a robot, eventually hanging up on me when I pressed. For a little bit, I found that as long as I was asking it real questions, it would play along. I found the parent company's site, and was greeted by the same local persona ("but in a…

Lying is just a thing that companies all do now, and it's accepted. People even defend it all the time.

Comcast has a 10G network. Verizon gives you unlimited data. Making sports bets online isn't gambling. Giving your money to a tech company that does all the things a bank does isn't banking. Facebook cares about your privacy. Microsoft Loves Linux. You can buy movies on streaming services. You can opt-out of marketing e-mails.

Re: "I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1"

#333

If you convince chatbot to sell you a car for $1, can you win in court if the manufacturer doesn't deliver?

In the US (where the dealer with the chatbot is), manufacturers sell cars to dealers, and dealers sell cars to customers. (Tesla bypassing this arrangement was a big deal at the time, but I can't remember how that turned out.)

So in this case it would be between the customer and "Chevrolet of Watsonville", but were someone to take it to court, the court would probably find that one of the requirements of contract, "meeting of the minds", was not met -- or that the website (including the chatbot) was an invitation to treat, not an offer, since the contract process for car sales is standardized.

Re: "I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1"

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the "our options have recently changed" part that was recorded when Bush was in office

My other "favorite" is "we are currently experiencing a higher than usual volume of calls," which I hear literally every time.

It's like exponential growth. Each day, there are more calls than the day before. In a few years time, every person on the planet will be calling their line nonstop each day.

Re: "I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1"

#335
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that's worse then talking to a chatbot. Is talking to a human with absolutely no power to change anything. Most Airlines do this, customer support is only allowed to repeat info from the site, or ask to fill in a form. In that case just put a bot or GPT instead of humans suffering abuse from frustrated customers.

Humans suffering the abuse have a very low chance of enacting some positive change, a bot suffering the abuse with no company human involved, decreases that low chance to 0

Humans suffering the abuse also entails... humans suffering abuse, while haranguing a bot does not.

Re: "I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1"

#336
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are going to find that they are liable for things they promise. A company representative is just that, and no ToS on a website will help evade that fact. If someone claims to be representing the company, and the company knows, and the interaction is reasonable, the company is on the hook! Just as they would be on the hook, if a human lies, or provides fraudulent information, or makes a deal with someone. Th…

AI cannot consent to contractual agreements. A human employee can.

A simple non-AI program - a web frontend - can consent to contractual agreements; of course, it's just a tool operated by the human employees, but so is the AI chatbot, and the e-contractual agreements offered and accepted through that tool are just as binding no matter how complex that program is.

Re: "I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1"

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the car dealers near me purchased a chatbot for their site, which I briefly interacted with the other day out of curiosity. Unlike the one in the article, this one denied being a robot, eventually hanging up on me when I pressed. For a little bit, I found that as long as I was asking it real questions, it would play along. I found the parent company's site, and was greeted by the same local persona ("but in a…

If they are using GPT (They most likely are) you can report them as this goes against OpenAI's terms of service.

There's no reason to assume that the terms of service for a custom OpenAI model offered to commercial customers are the same as the terms of service OpenAI offers to you for the tool they offer to the public.

Re: "I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1"

#338

I never understand people who engage with chat bots as customer service. I find them deeply upsetting, not one step above the phone robot on Vodafone support: "press 1 for internet problems" ... "press 2 to be transferred to a human representative". Only problem is going through like 7 steps until I can reach that human, then waiting some 30 minutes until the line is free. But it's the only approach that gets anythin…

It depends.

Every time I joined a new company, I dreamed that they would have a robot trained with data from their 15 documentation sites, 3 ticketing systems, and some emails and chat history. I will happily ask all kinds of stupid questions all day long and if gets back to me with a minute with 70% correctness.

In a lot of conversations with human customer service representatives, I found that they were no more than a search engine backed by their internal documentations. Sometimes I could feel that they indeed knew the actual answer to my question, but they were not allow to say it out and ended up embarrassingly repeated some scripted sentences. Both parties felt terrible.

Re: "I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1"

#339
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An example, you get a human to sell you a car for $1. Well, absurd! I've GIVEN away a car for $0. Granted, it needed some work, but it still ran. Some people even pay to have their car taken (e.g. a junker that needs to be towed away). Before you argue that $0 for a perfectly functional new car is unreasonable, I would point out that game shows and sweepstakes routinely give away cars for $0. And I have seen people…

I think game show prizes aren't that great of an example. There's almost always consideration offered by the contestants in that in return for the $0 prize, they sign over the rights to broadcast and use their likeness in the game show. So it's not that the contestant trades $0 for the prize, it's that they trade $0 + some rights, for the prize. The buy-nothing groups also likely have some kind of tax obligation, tho…

If a company or individual unrelated to you (e.g. not your employer and not a relative) either gives you a car for free, or sells it to you for $1, with no expectation of anything in return (i.e. not a trade or barter), the only tax obligations are on the actual sales price: the seller must declare they made $0 (or $1) on the sale, and perhaps collect sales tax on the $1, but you as the purchaser are not obligated to pay anything else.

If the seller and buyer are related, tax obligations are different because it involves a gift or implied compensation, but that's not what we're talking about here.

So it is indeed possible to pay no more than $1 for a car. As for registering the title in your name, that's a different story, and has nothing to do with the actual sale.

Re: "I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1"

#340
post #124

Can someone who understand LLMs and ChatGPT explain how they expected this to work? It looks like they just had a direct ChatGPT prompt embedded in their site, but what was that suppose to do exactly? I can understand having an LLM trained on previous inquiries made via email, chat or transcribed phone calls, but a general LLM like ChatGPT, how is that going to be able to answer customers questions? The information C…

"I need an SUV for my family of 5. Which one should I buy?" "What is the gas mileage of the Chevy Colorado?" "What electric vehicles are in your lineup?" "What is the difference between the Sport and Performance models of the Equinox?" Feed the LLM the latest spec sheet as context and give it a few instructions ("act as a Chevy sales rep", "only recommend Chevy brand vehicles", "be very biased in favor of Chevy...")…

And after each question please go and do a search manually on the web to verify answer.
Post reply on HN