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>“While a chatbot has an interactive component, it is still just a part of Air Canada’s website,” Tribunal member Christopher C. Rivers wrote. “It should be obv

by sigmar 3y ago

>“While a chatbot has an interactive component, it is still just a part of Air Canada’s website,” Tribunal member Christopher C. Rivers wrote. “It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website. It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot.” This seems entirely reasonable. But I have to wonder the limits. Clearly the customer in this case wasn't trying to scam Air Canada, but on the other end of the spectrum there's a case where a chatbot can be tricked to sell a car for a dollar[1]. What happens in the middle ground (perhaps where a user prods the bot for info about return policies and gets responses the user wants to hear)? [1] https://twitter.com/ChrisJBakke/status/1736533308849443121 https://twitter.com/ChrisJBakke/status/1736533308849443121

jacquesm 3y ago
If you can't stop your chatbot to sell a car for a dollar then maybe you shouldn't be operating that chatbot? Just like you shouldn't be employing sales people that sell items with negative margin.
retrac 3y ago
These are settled questions if you substitute "sales employee" for "chatbot". Or at least, the law has mechanisms to answer such questions. Easy example first: if you're trying to fast-talk someone into agreeing to sell an expensive car for $1, you're trying to scam them. No judge (I hope) is going to uphold that even if the words "Yeah, sure" came out of the salesperson's mouth. It gets more complicated when it's a contract people might actually sign. If you call up your ISP and the low-level sales representative agrees to give you 50% off for the next six months as credit for a couple days of service outage -- that might actually be a binding contract, even if it's well outside what the company authorized their agent to do. Same with agreeing to take a return, etc. However I am unsure whether thinking of chatbots as legal agents of their owner/operator is correct (either as a question of law, or just being useful as a metaphor).

by sigmar 3y ago

jacquesm 3y ago

If you can't stop your chatbot to sell a car for a dollar then maybe you shouldn't be operating that chatbot? Just like you shouldn't be employing sales people that sell items with negative margin.

retrac 3y ago

These are settled questions if you substitute "sales employee" for "chatbot". Or at least, the law has mechanisms to answer such questions. Easy example first: if you're trying to fast-talk someone into agreeing to sell an expensive car for $1, you're trying to scam them. No judge (I hope) is going to uphold that even if the words "Yeah, sure" came out of the salesperson's mouth. It gets more complicated when it's a contract people might actually sign. If you call up your ISP and the low-level sales representative agrees to give you 50% off for the next six months as credit for a couple days of service outage -- that might actually be a binding contract, even if it's well outside what the company authorized their agent to do. Same with agreeing to take a return, etc. However I am unsure whether thinking of chatbots as legal agents of their owner/operator is correct (either as a question of law, or just being useful as a metaphor).