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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

#401

Post by AnthonyMouse »

l33t7332273 wrote: post #254
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely a corporation with lots of resources knows better than to program a chatbot to make fake offers; they'd get sued. They didn't program it to do that, it's a characteristic of the technology that it makes mistakes. Which is fine as the public learns not to blindly trust its answers. It seems silly to assume that people won't be able to figure that out. People are capable of learning how new things work. This i…

> 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.

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

#402

Post by AnthonyMouse »

l33t7332273 wrote: post #255
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 I think that banning lying to customers is fine.

ChatGPT is presumably capable of making something up about ChatGPT pricing. It should be banned?

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

#403

Post by SuperNinKenDo »

astrange wrote: post #347
ryandrake wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe companies are so used to their $multimillion dollar legal teams winning against broke Average Joes that their legal departments are starting to just assume that it will always happen and that all court precedents are going to be favorable. They've been sniffing their own farts for so long they think it's fresh air.

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

Could you elaborate?

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

#404

Post by lamontcg »

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.

> and there's enough competition to force them to pass that on as reduced prices

i found the bug.

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

#405

Post by mytailorisrich »

eszed wrote: post #109
pjc50 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The long-term brand you want is Miele. They're not cheap but my parents' dishwasher is approaching 30 years old.

Without knowing anything particular about Miele, all this anecdote suggests is that they were great thirty years ago . They could well have enshittified between now and then. I'm at the point where I don't trust any brands at all anymore. The next time I need to make a major appliance purchase I'll buy a subscription to Consumer Reports and blindly follow their recommendation - I still trust them.

Miele now has cheaper models so you may be right to be cautious.

Personally I have had issues with Bosch and don't trust them anymore.

The result is that now either I car about specific look, some specific features, etc and pay a bit more for them, or I just go for cheapest.

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

#406

Post by JoshTriplett »

eru wrote: post #358
JoshTriplett wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'm trying to interact with a company and they direct me to a chatbot, I expect to get useful help 0% of the time, because…

Honestly, that's pretty similar to dealing with front-line level 1 human support.

I have a slightly higher expectation that first-line tech support can solve my problem if the problem is "you really should have had a self-service way to do this on your website but I'm sure you have a tool for this".

And if that isn't the case, I've mostly found that contrary to stereotype, many first-line tech support people are not such rote script-followers that they can't deal with skipping most of the script when the problem is obviously on their end and going to need real human intervention.

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

#407

Post by dmurray »

tomrod wrote: post #231
dmurray wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy who bought the Chevy Tahoe for $1 [0] isn't going to get it, though. And that's also perfectly sensible. But at some point we're going to see more cases in the grey area in between. What's the important difference? In both cases I think the result would be the same if the chatbot had been a human. GM doesn't have to honour every promise a sales rep makes, even if that rep is nominally entitled to enter into c…

> GM doesn't have to honour every promise a sales rep makes, even if that rep is nominally entitled to enter into contracts for the company - otherwise someone might agree to sell their whole stock to an accomplice for $1 The law doesn't protect a company in the world you laid out, internal compliance and controls do. A sales rep in a company with bad controls may well do exactly what you laid out.

This is nonsense. Can you imagine the chaos of a world where what you said is even close to true?

I'm a cashier at Walmart. One day I sell to you for $100 - not just everything in the store, but the building, the local distribution centre and even the corporate headquarters.

And in your view - Walmart has no legal recourse against me or against you? They should just peacefully vacate the buildings and hand over the keys? Their remedy to this is to discipline me according to their internal controls - maybe put me on a PIP and remind me that the company handbook forbids these deals?

No, this just isn't a deal that can happen. It's not about reasonableness, consideration or unconscionability - the deal is void even if the buyer agreed to pay $100 million. It's not about good faith on the buyer's side - it's void even if you thought I was the VP of Real Estate. I can't sell Walmart's property at any price, even though I'm otherwise empowered to do business on behalf of the company.

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

#408

Post by Aachen »

erhaetherth wrote: post #384
Aachen wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, we all agree on that. I'm just saying the article appears to exaggerate it further for comedic effect

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

#409

Post by philipswood »

vundercind wrote: post #194
philipswood wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this makes the point better: Say your webserver isn't scaling to more than 500 concurrent users. When you add more load, connections start dropping. Is it because someone programmed a max_number_of_concurrent_users variable and a throttleExtraAboveThresholdRequests() function? No. Yes, humans built the entire stack of the system. Yes every part of it was "programmed", but no this behaviour wasn't programmed int…

This is different from a bug or hitting an unknown limitation—the selling point of this was “it makes shit up” and they went “yeah, cool, let’s have it speak for us”. Its behavior incorporates randomness and is unpredictable and hard to keep within bounds on purpose and they decided to tell a computer to follow that unpredictable instruction set and place it in a position of speaking for the company, without a human…

We agree that this is an engineering failure - you can't deploy an LLM like this without guardrails.

This is also a management failure in badly evaluating and managing the risks of a new technology.

We disagree in that I don't think that its behaviour being hard to predict is on purpose: we have a new technology that shows great promise as tool to work with language input and outputs. People are trying to use LLMs as general purpose language processing machines - in this case as chat agents.

I'm reacting to your comment specifically because I think you are evaluating LLMs using a mental model derived from normal software failures and LLMs or ML models in general are different enough to make that model ineffective.

I almost fully agree with your last comment, but the

> they decided to tell a computer to follow that unpredictable instruction set

reflects what I think is now an unfruitful model.

Before deploying a model like this you need safeguards in place to contain the unpredictability. Steps like the following would have been options:

* Fine-tuning the model to be more robust over their expected input domain,

* Using some RAG scheme to ground the outputs over some set of ground truths,

* Using more models to evaluate the output for deviations,

* Business processes to deal with evaluations and exceptions, Etc

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

#410

Post by eru »

lamontcg wrote: post #404
eru wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> and there's enough competition to force them to pass that on as reduced prices i found the bug.

Cynicism aside, air travel is one of the industries with pretty healthy levels of competition. (At least in Europe and South East Asia. I haven't spent much time in North America, so can't judge the market there.)

People love to hate eg RyanAir, but their effect on prices is felt throughout the industry; even if you never take a single RyanAir flight.

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