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

• nine_zeros 3y ago
  So a lawsuit vector exists against AI-enabled lack of care for customers. Would be interesting to see if a cottage industry can open up around prompting inaccurate information from company AI info to reap via lawsuits.
  • nrmitchi 3y ago
    That seems like a stretch based on this specific case, given that the only award was explicit damages (ie, a refund of funds already spent). No one ended up “ahead” here.
  • bee_rider 3y ago
    This would be good, actually, right? Better to have the chatbot misfire on somebody not actually depending on it for correct info.
  • nkrisc 3y ago
    You’d have to do so without appearing to intend to do so, and in either case would be fraudulent.
    • HWR_14 3y ago
      I don't see how it's fraud or would need to have a disguised intent.
      • postalrat 3y ago
        If your intent is to get a wrong answer and you succeed then nice job. Do you really deserve a reward?
• lokar 3y ago
  The penalty for arguing they are not responsible for the “magic chatbot” telling lies to customers should be much more severe.
  • julianlam 3y ago
    It would've been if it were a lawsuit, but this was a tribunal hearing and recompense is limited to damages, that is, the amount the claimant was out of pocket. I'd love to stick it to Air Canada too, but Canada is (hopefully) less litigious than the US.
    • dannyw 3y ago
      You should have a little deterrent for “remarkable” cases like this. Say, double damages capped at $300.
• danepowell 3y ago
  I wonder whether the bot hallucinated the wrong information or whether the policy changed and the bot simply wasn't updated / retrained. The latter seems more likely but less interesting, akin to information on a boring HTML page getting overlooked during a site update.
  • dghlsakjg 3y ago
    The incident was in 2021, so I don’t think it was an LLM.
    • WirelessGigabit 3y ago
      No but it would be nice if the same laws would apply to LLMs. Too often they're now deployed as a quick fix for a chatbot. But before either they quoted me a solution or escalated to support. Now it makes up a non-working solution.
      • MBCook 3y ago
        Honestly would it make any difference if the information was just on an FAQ page and it contradicted what the actual ticket contract said? I’m with you. They should be held to the information they give out. Short of an employee purposely maliciously giving out bad information it seems like not making stuff up should be a basic requirement for them to operate.
• renewiltord 3y ago
  Where's the chatbot accessible from? Can't find it. I assume it was some old-school KB query chatbot not an LLM? Date says Nov 2022 and LLMs hadn't become quite as popular at that time yet. They have to obviously be responsible. What a nonsensical claim.
  • xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
    What difference does it make? If it happened today with an LLM the outcome should be the same.
    • petesergeant 3y ago
      > What difference does it make? In liability, none, but it'd at least be more understandable if it was an LLM, rather than something that should have been hard-coded with the right answers.
      • xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
        I'm not sure I follow. I wrote an "AI" chatbot in highschool and it certainly didn't reproduce hard-coded "right answers". LLMs don't somehow invalidate the work of their predecessors. Chat bots aren't new. I'm not really sure why you brought up LLMs at all. Are chat bots synonymous with LLMs now? I sure hope not because then this sort of scenario only gets worse.
        • petesergeant 3y ago
          > I'm not really sure why you brought up LLMs at all I didn't > I wrote an "AI" chatbot in highschool and it certainly didn't reproduce hard-coded "right answers" Sounds like it would have been a poor choice for a customer-service bot then?
          • xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
            My apologies, I misread. And it would certainly have been a poor choice for customer service, but I have definitely used chat bots that are far worse than that one was.
• Sakos 3y ago
  > Air Canada, for its part, argued that it could not be held liable for information provided by the bot. > "In effect, Air Canada suggests the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions. This is a remarkable submission. While a chatbot has an interactive component, it is still just a part of Air Canada’s website," Rivers wrote. This could be an article on The Onion. Unfortunately, I suspect this won't be the last time companies try to weasel their way out of the consequences of how they use AI in relation to their customers (i.e., us)
  • throwaway888abc 3y ago
    Indeed interesting, even in alternative reality if their argument is valid. They still "hired" the chatbot to provide service on their behalf and they are liable for it. Not lawyer, just spark of common sense ?
    • bee_rider 3y ago
      I don’t think hiring is a good analogy here. A human at least can bear responsibility. A chatbot cannot. That responsibility has to be absorbed by something. A company should be much more responsible for the actions of programs they run, than people they hire.
      • em-bee 3y ago
        if a human makes that mistake the company is still responsible for it. the company can however then turn against that human they hired and sue them. if that court determines that said human does bear responsibility the company will get something back. that has no bearing on what the customer gets from the company however. so for the customer it is irrelevant how the mistake by the company was made.
  • nerdponx 3y ago
    I love a good spicy legal opinion like this.
• usaar333 3y ago
  I find it hard to understand the calculus on Air Canada's side of fighting this. Not a lot of money and really bad press.
  • dmix 3y ago
    Because it probably threatens a whole new customer support system they spent 100x developing / migrating to vs what they spent in lawyers for this case
    • ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
      Out of court settlements have no effect on precedent. We would even be here if the manager this got escalated to at some point had just done their job and made an exception.
      • dmix 3y ago
        So it wouldn’t make other lawsuits easier in civil law? I don’t know the law well here
  • plorg 3y ago
    If they can be held liable for their shitty software replacing a human then it might not actually be cheaper to replace the human with shitty software.
  • dghlsakjg 3y ago
    You overestimate AC. They are buried in compensation claims right now due to them claiming that crew shortages in 2021 and 2022 were out of their control, and the government regulators disagreeing with them. My guess is that no one with any power bothered to look at this until it was too late to settle, and they thought it was worth the cost of fees to see if they could get out of paying.
  • kwar13 3y ago
    Because they're mostly a monopoly and have been doing whatever they want for decades by now. They've gone bankrupt time and time again bailed out by tax money.
• ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
  Yo what was air Canada thinking here... 1 week after the flight, and he even provided the death certificate? How'd anyone let this go to 'court' (I'm not Canadian, it's a tribunal idk what that is) for $600. And I'm guessing it's Canadian so it's more like $400 US. What kind of point were they trying to prove here. I legitimately think you could talk amazon support into giving you that over a broken product.
  • pwarner 3y ago
    Yeah the real story seems to be garbage customer service: by the AI and humans at Air Canada. Perhaps the bot is implemented perfectly to match the humans it replaced.
  • cperciva 3y ago
    it's a tribunal idk what that is The Civil Resolution Tribunal is better known as "online small claims court". It's something BC introduced a few years ago to streamline the process.
  • dghlsakjg 3y ago
    The civil resolution tribunal is kind of a hybrid small claims court and arbitrator. It was originally started about a decade ago with limited scope over condo/HOA disputes and small claims, but has been expanded. They have legal authority, but you can always appeal to the provincial courts (which almost never works out, I think they agree with CRT decisions in 95% of cases) Air Canada baffles me. Their front line employees are powerless and frequently hostile. But I have never submitted a complaint to corporate without being given at least $200 CAD worth of flight credit. Most recently I was yelled at and hung up on by a customer service agent, I got a coupon for 20% off any itinerary with up to 4 passengers. I’m not even a member of their rewards program!
    • Scoundreller 3y ago
      Same here. Came across something that was broken on a plane that wasn’t serious in any way and I wasn’t even mad about. But I don’t bother going through “feedback” or “comment” because I figure they never action on those. So I submit my “complaint”. A few months later, I get a response clearly showing that they didn’t read what I wrote, and almost certainly didn’t put in any plan to fix it; but they gave me a $400 credit. I wasn’t even angry in my “complaint”. Maybe I need to be nicer in my actual complaints in general in the future. Thought it was a scam when I got the response but I’ll take it.
• ilaksh 3y ago
  November 2022.. might have been a pretty weak model or just out of date info. This to me is a cautionary tale against deploying cheap small LLMs instead of using larger models. I think 7b models are very tempting to many business people who may value profits over just about anything else.
  • potatolicious 3y ago
    ... Larger models aren't immune from hallucinations, nor is the rate of hallucination negligible enough to ignore with larger models. This is a fundamental issue with the underlying technology, one that many companies in this space refuse to reckon with. A lot of "this can be automated with AI!" startups are relying on the basic assumption that hallucinations can be tolerated - cases like this really narrow the field of use cases where that is true.
    • ilaksh 3y ago
      Hallucination or inaccuracy is dramatically worse with 7b models versus the largest ones.
    • quirkot 3y ago
      Just wait till an aggressive lawyer finds out about this. Gonna be a lot of companies taken to the cleaner for hallucinations
  • cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    There is no evidence they used a small LLM. There is no evidence that LLM size is the issue. Environmentally bad to use a large model when a smaller one could work just as fine.
    • MBCook 3y ago
      There’s no evidence it was even an LLM at all.
  • roncesvalles 3y ago
    I just don't understand why companies don't use something like Algolia on their KB articles with some careful manual keyword curation. Imagine all the person had to do was type "bereavement" in a search bar and it instantly matched with the bereavement policy. What more does a person need?
• htrp 3y ago
  who was the vendor that supplied the chatbot?
• kazinator 3y ago
  If a vendor communicates multiple different prices for the same thing in different places, such as different areas of their website, or their website versus an e-mail flyer, or any pieces of paper from the vendor, they must give you the lowest price among all of them and not make excuses like that you should check the other communications and understand that the price is one of the higher ones. This is just common sense.
• plantain 3y ago
  Air Canada has always been like this. They were notorious amongst the stranded-abroad community during COVID for selling tickets on flights they weren't operating and had no intention to operate, then refusing to refund, except with credits that also expired before they intended to operate. Scammers from top to bottom.
  • MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Were they ever practically compensated in the end?
    • cperciva 3y ago
      Yes, the government gave airlines a bailout conditional on them issuing refunds.
      • CogitoCogito 3y ago
        I don’t know anything about the details of that bailout, but I feel the only reasonable and fair approach would be to (1) require that customers were refunded unconditionally and the (2) be forced to pay statutory damages. Then _if_ Air Canada couldn’t do that without a bailout, the government should have bailed them out while taking equity for the value of the bailout.
  • FireBeyond 3y ago
    Sounds like Qantas, who sold thousands of tickets on flights they knew were never going to operate.
  • throwaway2037 3y ago
    Canada is a good democracy. As your parliament to split Air Canada into multiple carriers or reduce any state-provided advantages to allow better competitors to emerge.
    • Georgelemental 3y ago
• janalsncm 3y ago
  Good. Company outsources customer “service” to a completely unreliable piece of software, which goes to show how much they care about their customers. And then they argue in court that customers shouldn’t even trust their own software! So essentially they have increased profits by cutting customer service jobs, replaced humans with a stochastic parrot, and now don’t want to be responsible for the drawbacks of this decision. They want all of the upside and none of the downside.
  • apapapa 3y ago
    In their defense, I never seen an airline company caring about their customers... Otherwise they wouldn't be late 25% of the time.
    • CaptainZapp 3y ago
      Not necessarily so. A couple weeks ago Oman Air cancelled the return leg of a long distance flight due to a change in schedule. They offered to reroute me with the Qataris via Doha. I preferred to cancel the (in principle non-refundable) flight and make different arrangements. The money,~2'500$, was credited to my card 4 days later. Including fees paid for preferred seats. It's a shame that they stopped service to my city. Beause it's a great airline, which always provided stellar service.
      • rowyourboat 3y ago
        Those are your basic rights: You entered into a contract with the airline, and the airline failed to deliver. Of course you get your money back if the alternative solution is not satisfactory - whether or not the ticket was refundable doesn't even enter into it, as it was the airline that failed to deliver in the first place. That's not stellar service, that's just fulfilling their legal obligations.
        • throwaway2037 3y ago
          I think the point being made: It was refunded very quickly and without hassle. Other, less scrupulous / ethnical airlines were try more tactics to redirect to worse flight or delay refund (if at all -- "oh, it was a lost in our system").
• guardiangod 3y ago
  I just want to give a shoutout to BC's Civil Resolution Tribunal. They take their job seriously, and make it as easy as possible for plaintiff to submit a complaint. I once had the misfortune of generating a batch of defective enterprise-grade SSD from a S company. That S company requires all RMA to go through the sales channel you bought the SSD from, but the sales company we used was out of business. S has refused all attempts to RMA by stonewalling us saying that we need to return the drives thru the bankrupted company. When we explained that the company is bankrupted, S just ignored us. When we created a new RMA request, S's rep says we already have an open case, and that we need to return the drives blah blah blah. After 5 months, in a fit of rage I typed up a 2000 words complaint, gathered all the emails/phone calls/photo evidences, and submitted a complaint to CRT ($75 fee). I wasn't expecting much, but within 3 weeks I got a call from a corporate lawyer in S company's Toronto office, asked me for the situation, apologized profusely, and asked if I can drop the case if they RMA all affected SSDs. That day was great, to say the least. Aside: The CRT posts all their cases (that reached arbitration) here- https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/en/nav.do https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/en/nav.do Reading the cases is quite am entertaining time passer.
  • 20kleagues 3y ago
    BC CRT is great when the happy pathway happens. They send legal letters to all parties so they are able to arbitrate, and that letter might be enough to get things resolved. I had the misfortune of trying to use them for a company which had just stopped responding and in the end even though I did get the default judgment in my favour, actually enforcing the judgment still required me to go through the normal courts (which in my case was not worth the cost). But the process of dealing with CRT was nothing short of delightful.
  • anamexis 3y ago
    What is a S company?
    • bakkerthehacker 3y ago
      Samsung I've also had to deal with their lack of Canadian RMA for 2 SSDs. Had to go back and forth with them and trying to convince Amazon and the Amazon seller to replace the defective drives. Not buying any more Samsung memory products due to their essential non existent warranty in Canada
• userbinator 3y ago
  Companies should be responsible for the information they give customers, regardless of how they do it. "Give me a real human" is usually what I say when it seems like I'm talking to a bot. Unfortunately, there have been times when I later discovered that the "bot" was actually a real human that was just acting like a bot! While AI may seem to be improving, I always keep in mind the possibility that the opposite is also happening; and if you don't want your job replaced by a bot, perhaps you should not be acting like one.
  • blackboxlogic 3y ago
    That's why I start with "are you a human or a robot", then "what's your favorite color"
  • colechristensen 3y ago
    >if you don't want your job replaced by a bot, perhaps you should not be acting like one. Call center folks, especially the first couple of layers of them, are on scripts. They have decision trees and what to say written down. Bots can be much more dynamic than them. It's a pretty terrible job unless you're fairly uniquely predisposed to liking that kind of work.
    • rsynnott 3y ago
      This case is an interesting example where the LLM is _worse_ than that; it's not on rails in the same way a front-line call-centre worker would be, so can make stuff up with impunity. This would never have happened with a conventional scripted hotline; at worst it could only have happened if the caller was escalated to someone with the authority to make stuff up, but for a simple question like this they wouldn't have been.
      • reaperman 3y ago
        It could be though. The LLM could just choose from options one through 10 of a list of prescribed responses, and an interposer could validate that the output of the LLM truly is an integer and then send that chosen message to the customer.
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  ouch I cant believe they really tried those arguments the chatbot as a separate legal entity? do they mean like a contractor’s service, or did they mean like a distinct AI creature
  • dlivingston 3y ago
    Either way, if their argument were upheld, it would be insanely interesting to see the second-order effects of that. Like, could you spawn up a local LLM, have it take out some loans and transfer you the funds, and then "kill it" (^C), so the loan liability dies with the LLM?
• gorbypark 3y ago
  Oh, wow! There was a twitter thread that made the rounds a while back about a guy who jokingly got a car dealership's chatbot to agree to sell him a car for basically free...Living in BC and reading this article has given me a great idea...!
• rsynnott 3y ago
  Well, it's hard to see who else could be?
• ooboe 3y ago
  "In an argument that appeared to flabbergast a small claims adjudicator in British Columbia, the airline attempted to distance itself from its own chatbot's bad advice by claiming the online tool was "a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions." "This is a remarkable submission," Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) member Christopher Rivers wrote."" From https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit-1.7116416 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-c...
  • onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    How is this different from me getting one of my friends to work at Air Canada and promise me a billion dollars to cancel my flight? Will Air Canada be legal for my friend going against company policy?
    • vundercind 3y ago
      The computer only does what they told it to. What they told it to do was to behave very unpredictably. They shouldn’t have done that.
      • philipswood 3y ago
        Not these ones... These ones do what they "learned" from a lot of input data using a process that is us mimicking how we think brains could maybe function (kinda/sort off with a few unbiological "improvements").
        • vundercind 3y ago
          Yes, these ones. Somebody told the computer to do all those things you just wrote.
          • philipswood 3y ago
            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 intentionally, it is an emergent property arising from system constraints. Maybe the database connection pool is maxed out and the connections are saturating. Maybe some database configuration setting is too small or the server has too few file handles - whatever. Whatever the root cause (even though that cause incidentally was implemented by a human if you trace the causal chain back far enough) this behaviour is an almost incidental unintended side effect of that. A machine learning system is like that, but more so. An LLM, say, is "parsing" language in some sense, but ascribing what it is doing to human design is pretty indirect. In a way you typing words at me has in some way been "programmed" into you by every language interaction mankind has had with you. I guess you could see it that way, but I don't think it's a particularly useful point of view. In the same way an LLM has been in directly "programmed" via it's model architecture, training algorithm and training data, but we are nowhere near the understanding of the process to be able to consider this "programming" it yet.
• kazinator 3y ago
  My take away from this is that Air Canada would rather fight a customer in court than suffer a few hundred dollar refund as the cost of figuring out they have a flaw in the consistency of their system. (And in the face of an extreme unlikelihood of winning against prevailing common sense, too.)
  • denlekke 3y ago
    i imagine that paying out would set a precedent or provide future discoverable evidence that they want to avoid. fighting (and winning) might have allowed them to continue their chat bot system without needing to change anything.
    • lawlessone 3y ago
      I think this has backfired enormously then. Wouldn't this case set a precedent?
  • bo1024 3y ago
    I wonder if they really thought this would set a precedent that benefited them.
  • bena 3y ago
    Because if they win this, they get to keep the good and ignore the bad. They get to automate a large chunk of their customer service and when the chatbot does something really stupid they can tap on the sign that says "We're not legally bound by our chatbot"
    • kazinator 3y ago
      But anything output by your chatbot is no different from something you put onto a billboard, or into a flyer or any other communication. The idea that a discount offered by a chatbot is not valid in the same way as one written on a coupon is nonsensical. Maybe they were thinking, if we spend a bit more money on lawyers, we can try this crapshoot.
• Mistletoe 3y ago
  https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/archives/2009/04/21/a-car-that-costs-1395-bananas/ https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/archives/2009/04/21/a-car-that-c...
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ooboe 3y ago
  Air Canada is going to get a lot of publicity over an $812 judgement in a provincial small claims court.
  • apapapa 3y ago
    It just did
• JCM9 3y ago
  With execs pounding their fist on the table saying “Go get me some of that GenAI stuff!” expect to see a lot more really poorly implemented “AI assistants” and other half-baked AI projects causing blunders for businesses. Eventually the dust will settle and folks will find more attenuated ways to get value out of this tech without creating a big mess. In the meantime get some popcorn ready for the AI-fueled comedy of errors that’s about to play out across many companies.
  • DonHopkins 3y ago
    It's those same execs who GenAI could replace and do a better job than.
• solardev 3y ago
  What the heck is a bereavement fare and how do you get them? Do most airlines offer that? Edit: Whoa, apparently several do. In my 30 years of flying, I never knew this! https://travel.usnews.com/features/bereavement-flights#alaska https://travel.usnews.com/features/bereavement-flights#alask... If an immediate family member passes away, some airlines will give you a discount.
• mrweasel 3y ago
  The article doesn't state what kind of chat bot this is. Is it an LLM, or a pre-LLM bot programmed to act on certain keywords? If it's the latter, I'd assume that Air Canada would be able to go in and check why the bot would give a wrong answer, most likely outdated policy information, or a misreading from whomever entered the answer to that prompt. However, if the bot is based on an LLM, then what's the point? It's apparently worse than an old school bot, in that it cannot be trusted to give correct answers, it's just better at understand queries. There was a quote in the article "I'm an Old Far and AI Makes Me Sad": “If we open up ChatGPT or a system like it and look inside, you just see millions of numbers flipping around a few hundred times a second,” says AI scientist Sam Bowman. “And we just have no idea what any of it means.” If that's true, then you can not use these systems for anything where you may need hold some one responsible for the output.
• perihelions 3y ago
  That airline policy is the kind of micro-optimization that no individual human would do, but distributed decision-making of large organizations effect all the time. There's profit to be found by targeting people in distress—like someone who just had a person close to them die—and abusing their distraction to confuse them into paying more money then they need to. Allowing a grace period to claim this "bereavement discount" is a human(e) policy. Making the client claim the discount immediately, or else lose it, is monstrous. Today, the robot showed more humanity than Air Canada's human leadership. That was an accident; the future could be the opposite of that. You could program machines to be "better" employees than humans, more aligned with organizational goals like "maximize profit at absolutely any cost", or "win wars at absolutely any cost", or "win elections at absolutely any cost". We humans aren't completely aligned with our teams; we have moral scruples that limit us—we can't achieve the 100% "absolutely any cost" part. I think that might suddenly change, and we might find ourselves drowning in an unexpectedly in-human world. (This was inspired by, I forgot who wrote it (?), a writer's observation about the evils of war being easier when morality is distributed. The commander who orders the atrocity, doesn't do it; the solider who commits the atrocity, has no agency in his actions. Both feel reduced culpability, and can go farther in effecting their goals than an individual acting alone).
• apapapa 3y ago
  I bet it would have gone the other way here in the USA.
• Arrath 3y ago
  Quite a sensible judgement, it seems. Pretty outrageous for the airline to try to claim the chatbot was its own legal entity.
  • itsmartapuntocm 3y ago
    They want to have their cake and eat it too. To use AI to get rid of paying for labor, but also not assume any of the risks that go along with it.
    • washadjeffmad 3y ago
      At least they could claim it as a training issue.
  • arcticbull 3y ago
    Surprised they didn't try and claim it was an independent contractor.
  • dmurray 3y ago
    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 contracts for the company - otherwise someone might agree to sell their whole stock to an accomplice for $1. The same applies to Air Canada, my buddy there can't "advise" me I get free flights for life and have that honoured. So where is the line? Is it about good faith by the customer, or about what a reasonable person might think the company would offer them? [0] https://twitter.com/ChrisJBakke/status/1736533308849443121 https://twitter.com/ChrisJBakke/status/1736533308849443121
    • tomrod 3y ago
      > 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.
• solarpunk 3y ago
  RAG Agents are gonna cost the companies that run them a lot of money, in more ways than one
• ruined 3y ago
  https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22Air+Canada%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...
  • Aachen 3y ago
    For posterity, it might be nice to configure the past week as a specific date range btw
• Believeben 3y ago
  [dead]
• DeepYogurt 3y ago
  Good
• brentm 3y ago
  I just can't believe it took a lawsuit to get an airline to fork over a few hundred bucks on something that was obviously their fault.
  • londons_explore 3y ago
    And the issue here was purely procedural - we aren't talking about some damage they refuse to pay for, but merely some customer using the 'incorrect' process to claim something they are eligible for.
  • ceejayoz 3y ago
    Yeah; this should've been well within some second-tier customer service manager's discretionary refund budget. Instead they've got a precedent-setting ruling that makes the chatbot a huge liability.
    • silisili 3y ago
      I hope they do become huge liabilities as it's irresponsible. I'm as excited as the next guy about the future, but companies shoehorning terrible "AI" to replace support channels is infuriating. The -only- good interaction I've had with a chatbot was the one Amazon uses or used to use, where you could click from a few options, and it'd just issue you a refund.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • beambot 3y ago
      Recall when the Chevy dealership's chatbot agreed to sell a Chevy Tahoe for $1... https://www.businessinsider.com/car-dealership-chevrolet-chatbot-chatgpt-pranks-chevy-2023-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/car-dealership-chevrolet-cha...
      • ceejayoz 3y ago
        If Chevy dealerships had $1 bereavement Chevy Tahoes as a normal business practice, I think that one would've gone the other way. In the Air Canada case, it was a clear good-faith effort to understand the rules of a fare he was legitimately entitled to.
• TheArcane 3y ago
  companies with AI chatbots probably: 1. Replace customer service agents with shitty LLM 2. Distance yourself with shitty service by shitty LLM 3. Profit.
• ndjshe3838 3y ago
  I hate the whole attitude the industry has towards AI models, it just seems so sloppy compared to software of the past It’s like “yeah we don’t really know what it’s going to do and it might screw up but whatever just launch it” Really surprised me that so many companies are willing to jump into LLMs without any guarantee that the output won’t be something completely insane
  • metalliqaz 3y ago
    They are salivating at the idea of being able to get humans off their payroll. The future is mass unemployment with all resources being split between a handful of trillionaires who control the AIs.
    • qayxc 3y ago
      That wouldn't make sense though - once a sizable portion of the customer base is too poor to buy the services, there's no source of income anymore and the whole system collapses.
      • jowea 3y ago
        That only potentially makes sense at a societal level, not at an individual company level. And the money saved with staff will end up in the stockholder's pockets, who will consume more.
      • kevin_b_er 3y ago
        "The system" for you and me, not the system for those at the top. They'll maintain their wealth. You're presuming the rich care about "the system". That they have morals or ethics. They do not.
        • maxcoder4 3y ago
          >You're presuming the rich care about "the system". That they have morals or ethics. They do not. Of course they have. You're parroting some low quality extreme left talking points. Rich people are people just like you and me, with their own motivations, goals and internal values. Dehumanizing them won't solve society's problems.
• bobterryo 3y ago
  Air Canada - We're not happy until you're not happy.
• morkalork 3y ago
  What are the chances that companies take the easy way out and slap a EULA on the chatbots like "by engaging in conversation with our automated agent you agree to <link to 100 page doc absolving them from anything the bot ever says or does they don't like>"?
  • londons_explore 3y ago
    100%
    • scottyah 3y ago
      Then they'll make it hard to get the information in any other way as well. Three humans on the phone lines and most of website content gone as they lay off the staff.
  • ado__dev 3y ago
    Nothing preventing them from doing it. But then customers will very quickly learn to not use the chat bots and instead call in or use other means. Would you use a company tool that even the company doesn't have faith in? And if companies remove human reps from the equation and only offer chatbots, then I'm sure eventually the regulatory agencies will step in.
    • morkalork 3y ago
      A rational actor, given a selection of alternatives, would not. Being stuck on hold when calling them is a frequent complaint though. And if there was real competition, stuff like this would've killed them long ago: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/air-canada-apologizes-after-customers-told-to-sit-in-seats-that-appeared-to-be-soiled/article_53f3ea16-0efa-50f5-95bb-e8c1e50b0c2d.html https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/air-canada-apologizes-af... https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cta-fine-air-canada-1.7067154 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cta-fine-air... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/dog-that-escaped-air-canada-employees-confirmed-dead/article15102724/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/dog-that-escap...
  • 3y ago
• ado__dev 3y ago
  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 have to double-triple check elsewhere to make sure that the chatbot is correct, or if anything the chatbot tells me is non-binding, then what's the point of using the chat bot in the first place? If you can't trust it 99% of the time, or if the company says "use this, but nothing it says should be taken as fact", then why would i waste my time? If a company is going to provide a tool, they should take responsibility for that tool.
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    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 brands I won't buy from again after having to jump through too many hoops to get (bad) warranty service.
    • jowea 3y ago
      The fines and lawsuits may be way cheaper than human staff.
      • jorisboris 3y ago
        Especially once we have ai lawyers ;)
        • kingo55 3y ago
          Judge, I'll refer you to my legal chatbot. I rest my case.
          • 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
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• labrador 3y ago
  If I ran their large multi-page website I could search over it for every occurence of "bereavement fare" to find out exactly what we are telling people and check it for accuracy. I can't do that with a LLM afaik. I can't ask it "tell me every thing you can say about "bereavement fare". LLM's are not inspectable like that. LLMs are tuned and output filtered, but can this catch all errors?
• CamelCaseName 3y ago
  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.
  • simoncion 3y ago
    > Someone could make a killing making a fake airline, taking payments for flights... Given how (relatively) significantly-regulated airlines are in the US, I doubt that this would work for long, and I expect that the FAA would make sure that the company lost a substantial amount of money for trying that shit.
  • joecool1029 3y ago
    > 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 airline.
    • bpye 3y ago
      Canada introduced new regulations in response to cases like yours [0]. It required some persistence but Air Canada did abide by the regulations in my case last year. My flight from Vancouver to Toronto was delayed by a couple hours and I missed the connection to Edinburgh. They, as required, booked replacement flights via Air France (not a partner airline) as the next Air Canada or partner airline route would have departed more than 9 hours late. [0] - https://rppa-appr.ca/eng/right/flight-delays-and-cancellations https://rppa-appr.ca/eng/right/flight-delays-and-cancellatio...
    • alright2565 3y ago
      Apologies for the off-topic reply here, but they've just fixed the ipv6 issues with gtlib by removing the AAAA records.
• deleted 3y ago
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• angarg12 3y ago
  We are just getting started with the age of LLM mishaps, and it's just going to get more ridiculous. I was talking with an ML engineer that told me they had a lot of success fine tuning a LLM on their internal docs. A chatbot could solve about 70-80% of questions without the need of human intervention. However their next big idea was to fine tune the LLM with the company financial data so that the finance department could get the information they need without custom queries or tech skills. We are just a few steps away from LLMs feeding hallucinations to decision makers and then those acting on bogus data.
• xyst 3y ago
  Wow, going through all of that for $650. I guess it’s better to send a message. Cost of Air Canada lawyers well exceed the judgement here. Why would they bother fighting this?
  • notatoad 3y ago
    i'd assume they're just following a general policy of having somebody in their legal department respond with a rebuttal for every single claim that comes in. on balance, it probably saves them money over having somebody with decision-making power make a decision on whether or not to fight things on a claim-by-claim basis.
• 2-718-281-828 3y ago
  that this is how it should be is obvious to everybody except the management. what i'm wondering is how do you prove such misconduct as a customer?
• charles_f 3y ago
  I don't use chatbots. I don't like their non determinism, and the little I've tried, it never had the answer for what I was looking for. I much prefer browsing the website
• OnionBlender 3y ago
  I wonder if companies will just show a disclaimer first to avoid responsibility. "This chatbot is provided for entertainment purposes only. If you trust anything it says, you only have yourself to blame. Reading this message waives your right to sue us."
• TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  It's a start, but there should be some kind of general Algorithmic Integrity law. Hallucinating chatbots, automated YT copyright strikes, Insta accusations of bothood because you clicked too fast, Amazon nuking author accounts because it gets confused, self-driving cars that don't self-drive - and so on. They're all the same problem. At best these are large corporations automating processes with unacceptably poor reliability. At worst, they're hiding deceptive and manipulative practices behind algorithms so they can claim they're not responsible for damage caused.
• renewiltord 3y ago
  Interesting that this is just straightforward error. It's not an LLM or similar so whatever KB it was drawing from is just broken.
• MintPaw 3y ago
  What actually happened? It said they could the refund window was 90 days, but why didn't it work? "But when he applied for a refund, Air Canada said bereavement rates did not apply to completed travel and pointed to the bereavement section of the company’s website." Does this mean they actually took flight with no issues, but then requested a refund afterwards because it was for a funeral?
  • Aachen 3y ago
    I also found it very confusingly written, and as a non-native speaker, I initially took bereavement to refer to a flight delay (imagine my confusion about the claim "you can't apply for this refund on completed travel"). Then looked up the word and my initial association with something negative was correct: it's about death. The only explanation that I think fits all the article's statements is this: 0. AirCan offers a discounted rate if you fly to someone's death, probably because of the country's size (it's a weird concept to me as a Dutch person!) 1. Person asked the bot how to get this discounted rate, what papers AirCan needed to see 2. Bot said (not shown in article, the only relevant-looking link goes to some stupid news category page): you get your discount afterwards, not before. This seems to be phrased in the article as "refund", but I take it to mean "partial refund to the amount of the discount" 3. Person flies, then applies 4. AirCan now says: you can't apply for this anymore after the travel was completed
• iainctduncan 3y ago
  I am Canadian. Air Canada has the worst customer service and treatment by far. This is hardly surprising, they try to weasel out of any responsibility all the time. This is the same company that just got slapped for making a disabled dude crawl out of the airplane when air cans special chair didn't show up. I shit you not.
• xutopia 3y ago
  I'm happy we have this precedent now in Canadian law. I'm wondering how such a thing would play out in the US.
• greenavocado 3y ago
  What happened to the GMC dealer whose GPT chatbot was promising customers free trucks while claiming the contract was legally binding?
• astrange 3y ago
  I notice almost all the comments here assume this is an AI chatbot, but the original incident happened in November 2022, which is before ChatGPT was released, so… were there any LM based chatbots then?
• frabjoused 3y ago
  The header "Company claimed its chatbot ‘was responsible for its own actions’ when giving wrong information about bereavement fare" is such a great example of an article giving misleading information to up sensationalism. Later on it's explained "Air Canada argued that despite the error, the chatbot was a “separate legal entity” and thus was responsible for its actions." That's a completely different argument and much less alarming.
  • ggm 3y ago
    > That's a completely different argument and much less alarming. Actually, it's just as alarming. The entity behind the chatbot might be a separate legal entity, but that doesn't absolve the airline, who outsourced a function bound to their terms and conditions. If they literally tried to absolve blame by assigning personhood and liability to the bot, that's insanely bad.
  • erhaetherth 3y ago
    Those 2 sentences are identical? Unless they meant the company that made the chatbot was a separate legal entity. If the chatbot itself is a "separate legal entity" then that's basically saying the same thing.
• nequo 3y ago
  I don’t believe that the traveler mentioned in TFA did this but using a screenshot as evidence will not be viable in the longer run. Editing the HTML code of a webpage that is open in the browser is a key step in one of the popular IT support scams that are covered by YouTubers. But how else to present evidence of chatbot misinformation, I’m not sure.
• tqi 3y ago
  I don't see why AI is particularly germane to this case- if a human support rep from a third party contractor made the same statement I assume AC would have tried the same nonsense?
  • erhaetherth 3y ago
    They're not liable for the things that come out of their employees' mouths? Maybe my flight tickets aren't valid either because I foolishly purchased them on aircanada.com and their website is known to have bugs? Or the ticket lady punched the wrong thing into her computer? Or I should have known the plane was going to be overbooked?
    • tqi 3y ago
      My read from the article was that because the chatbot is a third party company, they were liable for the error. Which I assume is the same argument they would have made if chat support was outsourced to some outside firm. Of course, either way it is an idiotic argument.