Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount | Airline tried arguing virtual assistant was solely responsible for its own actions::Airline tried arguing virtual assistant was solely responsible for its own actions
This is an interesting discussion, thank you.
From a technical perspective then absolutely, systems should be built with sufficient safeguards in place that makes mis-selling or providing misinformation as close to impossible as it can be.
But accepting that things will sometimes go wrong, this is more a discussion of determining who is in the right when they do.
My primary interest is in the moral perspective - and also legal, assuming that the law should follow what is morally correct (though sadly it sometimes does not).
With that out of the way, then yes, if a human agent said “sure fuck it I’ll give it you for $1” then yes I would expect that to be honoured, because a human agent was involved and that gives the interaction the full support and faith of the company, from the customer perspective. The very crucial part here, morally, is that the customer has solid grounds to believe this is a genuine offer made by the company in good faith.
A chatbot may be a representative of the company, but it is still a technical system, and it can still produce errors like any other. Where my personal opinion comes down on this is interpretation of intent.
Convincing a chatbot to sell you something for $1 when you know that’s an impossible deal is no different morally than trying to check out with that $3 TV in your basket that you equally know is a pricing mistake
It is rarely ever purely black-and-white from a moral perspective, and the deciding factor is, back to my previous point, is whether the customer reasonably knows they are taking an impossible deal due to a technical issue.
In summary:
The customer knows they are ripping off the company due to an error = should be in the company’s favour
The customer believes they are being made a genuine offer = should be in the customer’s favour (even if it was a mistake)
I think that’s probably all I can say.
And oh, just for the record I wish we could put AI back in the box and never have invented any of this bullshit because it’s absolutely destroying society and people’s livelihoods and doing nothing except make the 1% richer - but that is again a separate point.
Yeah so, we have a way of making chat bots that have safe gaurds to not sell overly discounted tickets or whatever. Its the normal dumb chatbots we’ve used for years. They aren’t smart, they can’t tell you a story, they can’t pull random law out of their ass. No its the ones with a handful of canned responses with a handful of questions it can answer because that’s all it’s programmed to do. Using an LLM for this is not only overkill but fucking stupid. LLM’s are only able to say what they think is the next thing in a conversation. If you ask it for a discount it’ll probably say “sure here’s 15% off” then not actually apply it.