[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.

[gregmac]

> The result would be a de facto ban on AI chatbots, because nobody knows how to get them not to make stuff up.

If, instead of a chatbot, this was about incompetent support reps that lied constantly, would you make the same argument? "We can't hire dirt-cheap low-quality labor because as company representatives we have to do what they say we'll do. It's so unfair"

[Zak]

> The result would be a de facto ban on AI chatbots

No, the result would be a de facto ban on using them as a replacement for customer service agents. I support that for the time being since AI chatbots can't actually do that job yet because we don't know how to keep them from lying.

They could put a disclaimer on it of course. To be sufficiently truthful, the disclaimer would need to be front and center and say something like "The chat bot lies sometimes. It is not authorized to make any commitments on behalf of the company no matter what it says. Always double-check anything it tells you."

[l33t7332273]

> 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.

[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.

[rideontime]

So what?

[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.

[ado__dev]

Yeah totally. LLMs have a lot of awesome use cases. But as chatbots, they need a lot of guardrails, and even then, I'm highly skeptical if they improve the experience over a simple searchable FAQs or docs.

[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...