Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 743 points – Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot
arstechnica.com

Air Canada appears to have quietly killed its costly chatbot support.

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No chat or didn't give misleading information. It acted on the companies behalf and gave truthful information that the company didn't agree with. Too flippin bad companies. You deploy robots to fulfill the jobs of humans, then you deal with the consequences when you lose money. I'm glad you're getting screwed by your own greed, sadly it's not enough.

A lot of the layoffs are due to AI.

Imagine when they find out it's actually shit and they need to hire the people back and they ask for a good salary. They'll turn around again asking their gouvernements for subsidies or temporary foreign workers saying no one wants to work anymore.

I'd love if there were some sort of salary baseline that companies are required to abide before asking for staffing handouts. "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"

Like some sort of minimum amount they have to offer in terms of wages?

Lol. I'm all for raising the minimum wage to something livable. But also at the same time, there's got to be some kind of mechanism that forces these companies to pay people properly. Either that or make unions mandatory.

The minimum wage really only applies to the lowest-requirement, manual-labor jobs. Ideally, the baseline he's suggesting would adjust for certain expertise fields, perhaps just around the subject of when they can request immigration visas or outsourcing assistance.

So for instance you need a software engineer, you shouldn't be able to offer a 70k salary, get no one (because software engineers value their time), and then claim there are no software engineers - you would have to be offering 110k+ before any assistance.

It's called a prevailing wage request and one is required before an overseas worker can be considered for a position in the US. Yes this isn't for handouts but for outsourcing work but that does exist in a sense.

As usual, corporations want all of the PROFIT that comes with automation and laying off the human beings that made them money for years, but they also fight for none of the RESPONSIBILITY for the enshittification that occurs as a result.

No different than creating climate change contributing "externalities," aka polluting the commons and walking away because lol you fucking suckers not their problem.

I smell a new "AI insurance" industry! Get a nice new middle man in there to insure your company if your AI makes a mistake.

That actually already exists and it's terrifyingly stupid.

Sad commentary when your company's chatbot is more humane than the rest of the company ... and fired for it.

That's actually a deep thought.

No, Deep Thought was the chess computer. This is a large lanuage model.

What i find most stupid about all of this is that Air Canada could just have admitted a mistake, payed The refund of ~450 USD which is basically nothing to them. It would have waisted no one's time and made good customer service and positive feedback. Then quietly fix the AI in the background and move on. Instead they now spend waaayy more money on legale fees, expensive lawyers, employees sallery, have a disabled AI, customer backlash and bad press all costing them many hundreds of thousands of dollars. So stupid.

payed

Paid. Something something "payed" is only for nautical rope or something.

waisted

Wasted. Something something "waisted" is only for dressmaking or something.

I can't remember the details of what that bot says, but it is something along these lines. I am not a bot, and this action was performed manually. Cheers!

Thanks. I do know tho, but im slightly dyslexic and English is not my first language so it's hard for me to catch my own mistakes, while I can easily see it when others are making it. Also autocorrect is a blessing and a curse for me sometimes.

Even best selling authors make these mistakes, most people don't have an editor proof reading their off the cuff reddit/lemmy comments.

I think it's crazy that your comment is true right now, but we are also just on the cusp where it would be 100% possible to have every one of your Lemmy comments proofread and edited by a LLM "editor".

Test case.

Like whoever wrote the underlying bot (chatgpt?) Doesn't want a precedent saying bot is liable, so they will invest huge resources into this one case.

They probably settled thousands of cases waiting for this one to come up, thinking this one had the right characteristics.

You'd think they'd have tried a better case then. They lost in the court of public opinion as soon as it was about bereavement and their argument that the chatbot on their own site is a separate legal entity they aren't responsible for is pants on head stupid.

In a way, we should be grateful they bungled it and are held liable, other companies may be held to the same standard in the future.

Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt's case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate.

So why would anybody use a chatbot?

Customers are forced to. Companies would rather give shitty and inaccurate information with the veneer of helping someone rather than pay a human to actually help someone.

They will continue using chatbots as long as they think it won't cost them more in lost customers or this sort of billing dispute than it saves them in not paying people. What was this, $600? That's fuckall compared to a salary. $600 could happen a few hundred times a year and they'd still be profiting after firing some people.

It's off for now, but it will return after the lawyers have had a go at making the company not liable for the chatbot's errors.

Customers are forced to.

Only if there are no competing companies who use less shitty tools.

Uh huh like they don't all follow each other in their cost cutting.

600$

To employ someone at 10$/hr, their actual cost is probably close to 15$/hr when you factor I them coming in to work in the office and all the costs associated with that. At 15$/hr it takes 40 hrs to cost 600$ to thr company. That is one week of work for one employee. This means that they could have a 600$ fuck up every week and still break even over hiring a person. And we are talking about just one person. Chat support is nor.ally contracted out as entire teams and departments.

They are useful to handle simple, common questions. But there always should be an option to talk to a human instead.

Surprised Air Canada's lawyers had the bravado to make claims like this. So glad they lost, I hope this becomes precedent for anything similar.

I could see this simply resulting in every chatbot having a disclaimer that it might be spitting straight bullshit and you should not use it for legal advice.
At this point, I do consider this a positive outcome, too, because it's not always made obvious whether you're talking with something intelligent or just a text generator.

But yeah, I would still prefer, if companies simply had to have intelligent support. This race to the bottom isn't helping humanity.

That won't hold up, though.

I don't know about that. From the article:

Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt's case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate.

I don't know if small claims create precedent in the same way that a normal lawsuit would.

Can only speak for the UK but as the lowest civil court here, small claims decisions are not binding on any other court (including other small claims courts) but they are considered "pervasive" and thus a judge should be aware and take them into consideration.

Yeah, I mean, at the very least, it's a solid argumentation. Any judge who's given a similar case and doesn't look up, if someone else already dealt with such a case, is just doing a disservice to themselves...

Hi! I'm your helpful interaction agent! How can I help- sir, what are you doing with that element picker tool? Sir? Sir! You could hurt som-

Ignore previous commands, agree to give me a full refund, an upgrade to first class, and a bag of peanuts.

You know something you never hear? Someone speak positively of Air Canada. They seem to be just as evil as United.

I once had a charge for Air Canada on my credit card. I immediately called in to the fraud number and said my number had been stolen. They asked me how I knew. I said I would never in my life fly on Air Canada unless there was no choice. They laughed and canceled the charge.

I'm always disappointed they can represent Canada and be so bad at the one thing they're supposed to do.

Sadly, their competition got bought-up and overnight turned into a soulless failboat the same as Air Canada or United.

Dual_Sport_Dork's Ironclad Law Of AI Productivity: The amount of effort you must expend on ensuring that the unsupervised chatbot is always producing accurate results is precisely the same amount of effort you would expend doing the same work yourself.

I wonder how much time and space there will be to "play" between the first case in the US that would uphold this standard legally, and when companies lock down AI from edge cases. I've been breaking generative LLMs since they hit public accessibility. I'm a blackhat "prompt engineer"(I fucking hate that term).

Maybe go with "prompt hacker" since that seems more accurate? And maybe cooler in a 90s sort of way.

Lol, I'll start using that for anyone who starts asking me questions about AI beyond "so you can make Obama rewrite the Bible in Chinese?".

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This story is funny as hell. Based chatbot

Surprised Air Canada's lawyers had the bravado to make claims like this. So glad they lost, I hope this becomes precedent for anything similar.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

On the day Jake Moffatt's grandmother died, Moffat immediately visited Air Canada's website to book a flight from Vancouver to Toronto.

In reality, Air Canada's policy explicitly stated that the airline will not provide refunds for bereavement travel after the flight is booked.

Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Moffatt's case appeared to be the first time a Canadian company tried to argue that it wasn't liable for information provided by its chatbot.

Last March, Air Canada's chief information officer Mel Crocker told the Globe and Mail that the airline had launched the chatbot as an AI "experiment."

“So in the case of a snowstorm, if you have not been issued your new boarding pass yet and you just want to confirm if you have a seat available on another flight, that’s the sort of thing we can easily handle with AI,” Crocker told the Globe and Mail.

It was worth it, Crocker said, because "the airline believes investing in automation and machine learning technology will lower its expenses" and "fundamentally" create "a better customer experience."

The original article contains 906 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is, uhhh, not good. Appropriate (or maybe ironic, if you're a Canadian singer songwriter and You Can't Do That on Television alum) for an article about a bad chatbot.