4 ms·

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 f

• no_wizard 3y ago
  I don't like the reasonable test in this case. If a representative of a company says something (including a chatbot) then in my mind, that is what it is. Companies should be on the hook for this because what their employees say matters. I think it should be entirely enforceable because it would significantly reduce manipulation in the marketplace (IE, how many times have you been promised something by an employee only for it not to be the case? That should be illegal) This would have second order effects of forcing companies to promote more transparency and honesty in discussion, or at least train employees about what the lines are and what they shouldn't say, which induces its own kind of accuracy
  • garciasn 3y ago
    You are right, in a perfect world. However, due to lawyers, the perfect world has been upended for the consumer. Sure, you can fight it, but over a few dollars returned and thousands paid for an attorney to fight it--only to get a settlement that doesn't change anything.
  • bruce511 3y ago
    Your certainty in this opinion makes me posit that you've never been an employer. Employees are people. They say stuff. They interact with customers. Most of what they say is true. Sometimes they get it wrong. Personally I don't want to train my employees so they can only parrot the lines I approve. Personally I don't want to interact with an employee who can only read from a script. Yes, some employees have more authority than others. Yes some make mistakes. Yes, we can (and do) often absorb those mistakes where we can. But clearly there are some mistakes that can't be simply absorbed. Verbal "contracts" are worth the paper they're written on. Written quotes exist gor a reason. In the context of this thread, chatbots are often useful ways to disseminate information. But they cannot enter into a contract, verbal or written. So, for giggles feel free to see what you can make them say. But don't expect them to give you a legal binding offer. If you don't like that condition then feel free not to use them.
• Pxtl 3y ago
  Doesnt' that apply to peer-to-peer support forums? Like, if I create a Hotmail Account and use it to post to https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us to reply to every comment "I'm an official Microsoft representative, you're our 10-millionth question and you just won a free Surface! Please contact customer support for details." Would that be their fraud or mine? They created answers.microsoft.com to outsource support to community volunteers, just like how this Chevy dealership outsourced support to a chatbot, allowing an incompetent or malicious 3rd party to speak with their voice.
  • no_wizard 3y ago
    thats impersonation of an employee or otherwise representative of the entity, and would be ultimately not be Microsoft's issue, but that of the person doing the impersonation. Since they aren't employed by Microsoft, they can't substantiate or make such claims with legal footing. I'm sure there are other nuances too that must be considered, however on the face of it, if a Chatbot is authorized for sales and/or discussion of price, and makes a sales claim of this type (forced or not) then its acting in reasonable capacity, and should be considered binding
• dylan604 3y ago
  Companies are not held liable for things that cannot be delivered even when an employee has stated they could. You can choose not to do business with them. Maybe the company chooses to reprimand the employee. How many times have we been told a technician will arrive between the hours of ___ to ___ only for it to not happen? How many times have we been told that FSD will be fully functional in 6 months? If companies were held liable for things employees said, there would be no sales people. I've never once met with a sales person that did not over sale the product/service.
  • beeboobaa 3y ago
    Verbal contracts are still contracts. And this was written down.
    • dylan604 3y ago
      From what I see written down was a user openly subverting the system.
    • fennecbutt 3y ago
      The whole verbal contract thing is so fucking dumb. If something's important, it's important enough to write down.
  • alpaca128 3y ago
    > Companies are not held liable for things that cannot be delivered A car for $1 can be delivered without any issues because delivering cars is their business model. It's their problem if their representative negotiated a contract that's not a great deal for them.
    • dylan604 3y ago
      When is the last time you bought a car where the sales person didn't need to "check with my manager"? Adding somewhere "all chatbot negotiated sales are subject to further approval" in a ToS/EULA type of document would probably protect them from any of this kind of situation
• NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  If a car dealership had a parrot in their showroom named Rupert, and Rupert learned to repeat "that's a deal!", no judge would entertain the idea that because someone heard Rupert repeat the phrase that it amounted to any legally binding promise. It's just a bird. It's a pet, a novelty, entertainment for the bored kids who are waiting on daddy to finish buying his mid-life crisis Corvette. It's not a company representative. > If someone claims to be representing the company, and the company knows, and the interaction is reasonable, A chatbot isn't "someone" though. > Try convincing a judge that the above was on purpose, by a 62 year old farmer that's never heard of AI. I don't think you know how judges think. That's ok. You should be proud of the lack of proximity that you have to judges, means you didn't do anything exceedingly stupid in your life. But it also makes you a very poor predictor of how they go about making judgements.
  • zdragnar 3y ago
    If the company is leading the customer to believe the chatbot is a person (i.e by giving it a common name, not advertising that it is not a human), it could be at least be a reasonable case for false advertising.
  • ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    > If a car dealership had a parrot in their showroom named Rupert, and Rupert learned to repeat "that's a deal!", no judge would entertain the idea that because someone heard Rupert repeat the phrase that it amounted to any legally binding promise. It's just a bird. If the car dealership trained a parrot named Rupert and deployed it to the sales floor as a salesperson as a representative of itself, however, that's a different situation. > It's not a company representative. But this chat bot is posturing itself as one. "Chevrolet of Watson Chat Team," it's handle reads, and I'm assuming that Chevrolet of Watson is a dealership. And you know, if their chat bot can be prompted to say it's down for selling an $80,000 truck for a buck, frankly, they should be held to that. That's ridiculously shitty engineering to be deployed to production and maybe these companies would actually give a damn about their front-facing software quality if they were held accountable to it's boneheaded actions.
    • 3y ago
• polski-g 3y ago
  AI cannot consent to contractual agreements. A human employee can.
  • krainboltgreene 3y ago
    No one is saying that AI can consent to a contractual agreement, however all the time we humans consent to a contractual agreement presented to us by some software tool on behalf of a company. That's what's happening here too.
  • FireBeyond 3y ago
    Not even that - I guarantee that somewhere you'll find a T&C that says that only certain employees or company officers can enter into binding agreements that alter the standard conditions of sale. This is about amusing, but just you saying "oh by the way this is legally binding on you" doesn't make it so. (Even moreso if you're all over the internet talking about permanence in AI models...)
  • dghlsakjg 3y ago
    I can sign up for all sorts of services without a human in the loop. Amazon used automation to offer me a sweetheart deal to not cancel prime (For example). Because it was a computer program that did it, does that mean they don't have to honor it? Of course not.
  • PeterisP 3y ago
    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.
• FireBeyond 3y ago
  > 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. Most T&Cs: "only company officers are authorized to enter the company into agreements that differ from standard conditions of sale."
• kmoser 3y ago
  > 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 on "buy nothing" type groups occasionally give a (admittedly used) car to people in need. So $0 for a car is not absurd or unreasonable. Perhaps unusual, but not unreasonable.
  • genocidicbunny 3y ago
    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.
    • kmoser 3y ago
      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.