[jasonjayr]

IANAL, but it's astounding they took that as their defense, rather than pointing to a line (I hope?) in their ToS that says "This agreement is the complete terms of service, and cannot be amended or changed by any agent or representative of the company except by ... (some very specific process the bot can't follow)". I've seen this mentioned in several ToSs, I expect it to be standard boilerplate at this point ...

[Drakim]

That does make sense, but on the flipside, let's say that they start advertising discounts on TV, but when people try to pay the reduced rate they say "according to our ToS that TV ad was not authorized to lower the price".

Obviously that wouldn't fly. So why would it fly with the AI chatbot's advertising discounts?

[AnthonyMouse]

You'd normally expect a TV ad to be authorized to make offers.

You wouldn't normally expect an AI chatbot to be authorized to make offers. Its purpose is to try to answer common questions and it has been widely covered in popular media that they hallucinate etc.

[Zak]

I disagree. I expect any credible offer a company makes in an advertisement, on its website, using a chatbot, or through a customer service agent to be authorized by the company. Surely a corporation with lots of resources knows better than to program a chatbot to make fake offers; they'd get sued.

And they did get sued. Next time maybe they'll make sure software they connect to their website is more reliable.

[AnthonyMouse]

> 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 is like the people who set the cruise control in their car when it first came out and then climbed into the back of the car to take a nap. That's not how it works and the technology isn't in a state where anybody knows how to do better.

[Zak]

I agree with your cruise control analogy in a sense, but I think it's Air Canada that's misusing the technology, not the customer. If they try to replace customer service agents with chatbots that lie, they need to be prepared to pay for the results. I'm glad they're not allowed to use such unreliable, experimental technologies in their airplanes (737 Max notwithstanding).

There's absolutely a technology available to make a chatbot that won't tell lies: connect a simple text classifier to a human-curated knowledge base.

[AnthonyMouse]

> 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 of the sky and everybody dies. If you use it in a chatbot, the customer can e.g. go to the company's website to apply for the discount it said exists and discover that it isn't there, and then be mildly frustrated in the way that customers commonly are when a company's technology is imperfect. It's not the same thing.

> There's absolutely a technology available to make a chatbot that won't tell lies: connect a simple text classifier to a human-curated knowledge base.

But then it can only answer questions in the knowledge base, and customers might prefer an answer which is right 75% of the time and can be verified either way in five minutes than to have to wait on hold to talk to a human being because the less capable chatbot couldn't answer their question and the more capable one was effectively banned by the government's liability rules.

[l33t7332273]

> 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.

[AnthonyMouse]

Most of these companies didn't make it, they took an existing one and fed it some additional information about their company.

[ado__dev]

I would expect that if I was talking to an official tool that the company provides to interact with to be authorized to give me information (including discounts and offers) to be accurate and true.

[AnthonyMouse]

What would it take to disabuse you of that notion now that your expectations have been observed to be in conflict with reality?

What you're describing isn't what you expect, it's what you wish were the case even though you know it isn't.

[Scarblac]

> Its purpose is to try to answer common questions

Yes. And therefore people should be able to assume that the answers are correct.

Some people have heard of ChatGPT, and some of those have heard that they hallucinate, sure. But that's still not that many people. And they don't know that a question answering chat bot like this is the same technology!

[AnthonyMouse]

> And therefore people should be able to assume that the answers are correct.

Why is that a necessary requirement? Something can be useful without it being perfect.

[ado__dev]

If I am trying to interact with a company and they tell me to use 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, 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?

[silverquiet]

This is why I’m a bit vexed by all the hype around LLMs. It reminds me of talking to a friend’s mother who was suffering from dementia - she could have a perfectly lucid conversation with you and then segue into stories that were obviously fictions that existed only within her head. She was a nice lady, but not someone who you would hire to represent your company; she was considered disabled.

Awhile back another commenter called them a “demented Clippy” which about sums them up for me.

[AnthonyMouse]

> If I have to double-triple check elsewhere to make sure that the chatbot is correct, then what's the point of using the chat bot in the first place?

Because you can ask it a question in natural language and it will give you an answer you can type into a search engine to see if it's real. Before you didn't know the name of the thing you were looking for, now you do.

> 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?

The rate at which it makes stuff up isn't 99%, is the point. For common questions, better than half of the answers have some basis in reality.

[kube-system]

> You wouldn't normally expect an AI chatbot to be authorized to make offers.

I think only software engineers would think this. I don't think it is obvious to a layperson who probably has maybe never even used one before.

[seba_dos1]

Of course language models can't be trusted, but it's not the customer's problem to think about chatbot's purpose, how it's implemented and whether it hallucinates or not.

[mc32]

If it was approved by the company, yes. But you wouldn't want Braniff Airlines to put out an ad for SouthWest Airlines advertising rock bottom lifetime tickets and have those be valid...

[JCM9]

Courts often rule that you can’t use ToS to overcome common sense. ToS are not a get out of jail free card if your company just does stupid things.

[dataflow]

How do those clauses actually work? If a rep does something nice for you (like give you something for free), could the airline say it never agreed to that in writing or whatever and demand it back? How are you supposed to know if a rep has authority to enter into an agreement with you over random matters?

But, to your question, my guess is that would basically be telling people not to avoid their chatbot, which they don't want to do.

[paxys]

It's more to shield them from cases like a rep gifting you free flights for life.

[dataflow]

I realize the intention but I'm wondering how it works legally given what the terms actually say.

[paxys]

What you are or aren't entitled to is written down in the terms of service. Support agents can only help interpret the terms for you. They may be authorized to go beyond that to some degree, but the company will also have the right to reverse the decision made by the agent.

[easyThrowaway]

I guess the original issue pointed by the judge would still stand: how am I supposed to know which terms are to be assumed true and valid? Why would I assume a ToS hidden somewhere (Is it still valid? does it apply to my case? Is it relevant and binding to my jurisdiction?) is to be considered more trustworthy than an Air Canada agent?

[AlexandrB]

How is that enforceable? In many cases this is carte blanche for company representatives to lie to you. No one is going to read the ToS and cross reference it with what they're being told in real time. Moreover, if a customer was familiar with the ToS they would not be asking questions like this of a chatbot. The entire idea of having a clause like this while also running a "help" chatbot that can contradict it seems like bad faith dealing.

[sdwr]

Those ToS statements overreach their capabilities a lot of the time. They're ammunition against the customer, but don't always hold up in the legal system.

[kreek]

Beyond the chatbot's error and the legal approach they took, this bad PR could have been avoided by any manager in the chain doing the right thing by overriding things and just giving him the bereavement fare (and then fixing the bot/updating the policy).