This was already budgeted for when they decided to use a chatbot instead of paying employees to do that job.
Trying to blame the bot is just lame.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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Corporate IT here. You're assuming they're smart enough to budget for this. They aren't. They never are. Things are rarely if never implemented with any thought put into any other scenario that isn't happy path.
As a corporate IT person also. Hello.
But we do put thought into what can go wrong. But no we don't budget for it, and as far as we are concerned 99% success rate is 100% correct 100% of the time. Nevermind 7 billion transactions per year multiplied by 99% is a fuck ton of failure.
Amen. Fwiw at my work we have an AI steering committee. No idea what they're doing though because you'd think enough articles and lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft on shady practices most recently allowing AI to be used by militaries potentially to kill people. I love knowing my org supports companies that enable the war machine.
Great! Please make sure that your server system is un-racked and physically present in court for cross examination.
Better put Ryan Gosling on standby in case he needs to "retire" the rouge Air Canada chatbot Blade Runner style.
Rogue*. I'm not usually that guy, but this particular typo makes me see red.
I know what you mean, except for me it makes me see rouge ever since I spent some time in France.
Yeah, that is indeed the joke I was making.
This is all very funny because despite your not being aware of it, the french word for red is rouge!
Ah, I no longer even Bat an eye at Rouge.
“Airline tried arguing virtual assistant was solely responsible for its own actions”
that’s not how corporations work. that’s not how ai works. that’s not how any of this works.
Oh, it is if they are using a dump integration of LLM in their Chatbot that is given more or less free reign. Lots of companies do that, unfortunately.
If it's integrated in their service, unless they have a disclaimer and the customer has to accept it to use the bot, they are the ones telling the customer that whatever the bot says is true.
If I contract a company to do X and one of their employees fucks shit up, I will ask for damages to the company, and They internally will have to deal with the worker. The bot is the worker in this instance.
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Oh, I believe it.
My 2024 bingo card didn't have a major corporation litigating in favor of AI rights in order to avoid liability, but I'm not disappointed to see it.
Why would air Canada even fight this? He got a couple hundred bucks and they paid at least 50k in lawyer fees to fight paying those. They could have just given him the cost of the lawyer's fees and be done with it
Because now they have to stop using the chatbot or take on the liability of having to pay out whenever it fucks up.
Which is fascinating, that they themselves thought there was any doubt about it, or they could argue such a doubt.
This is the same like arguing "It wasn't me who shot the mailmen dead. It was my automated home self defense system"
Agree 100%--i mean who are you gonna fine, the bot? The company that sold you the bot? This is a simple case of garbage in, garbage out--if they set it up properly and vetted its operation, they wouldn't be trying to make such preposterous objections. I'm glad this went to court where it was definitively shut down.
Fuck Canada Air. The guy already lost a loved one, now they wanna drag him through all this over a pittance? To me, this is the corporate mindset--going to absolutely any length necessary to hoover up more money, even the smallest of scraps.
Most likely to fight the precedent of them being liable for using an ai chatbot that gives faulty information.
A settlement would cost less, can be kept private, and doesn't set precedent. Now they have an actual court case judgement, and that does set precedent.
I think some companies have a policy of fighting every lawsuit and making everything take as long as possible, simply to discourage more lawsuits.
Because there is something far nastier in the world than self interest. This airline seems to me like it was operating from a place of spite.
It's a corporation. Of course it's operating from a place of spite.
Just how Air Canada does things now. I think it largely stemmed from the pandemic where people gave them leeway on things being a bit messed up. But now they've fallen into a habit of not taking responsibility for anything.
That's an important precedent. Many companies turned to LLMs to cut the cost and dodge any liability for whatever model can say. It's great that they get rekt in the court.
Lol. “It wasn’t us - it was the bot! The bot did it! Yeah!”
"See officer, we didn't make these deepfakes, the AI did. Arrest the AI instead"
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That seems like a stupid argument?
Even if a human employee did that aren't organisations normally vicariously liable?
That's what I thought of, at first. Interestingly, the judge went with the angle of the chatbot being part of their web site, and they're responsible for that info. When they tried to argue that the bot mentioned a link to a page with contradicting info, the judge said users can't be expected to check one part of the site against another part to determine which part is more accurate. Still works in favor of the common person, just a different approach than how I thought about it.
I like this. LLMs are powerful tools, but being rebranded as "AI" and crammed into ~everything is just bullshit.
The more legislation like this happens where the employing entity is responsible for the - lack of - accuracy, the better. At some point they'll notice they cannot guarantee the correct information is the only one provided as that's not how LLMs work in their function as stochastic parrots, and they'll stop using them for a lot of things. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
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A computer can never be held responsible so a computer must never make management decisions
- IBM in the 80s and 90s
A computer can never be held responsible so a computer must make all management decisions
- Corporations in 2025
Hey dumbasses maybe don't let a loose llm represent your company if you can't control what it's saying. It's not a real person, you can't throw blame to a non sentient being.
If you type "biz" instead of "business" in the first couple of lines, surely you're not expecting me to actually keep reading?!
I went ahead and read it anyway. I actually had to Google the last word of the article: natch. It's slang for "naturally". We're living in interesting times. Glad the guy got compensated after going through that ordeal.
Funnily enough, I thought the article was written by AI. I guess they trained it off something, lol
That's just "El Reg's" style; they've been that way for years. Don't let their pseudoinformality fool you, though, they know their stuff.
Yeah, you mean they've been getting worse for years! Would expect better from a UK based publication that isn't a tabloid, tbh
Oh good, we've entered into the "we can't be held responsible for what our machines do" age of late-stage capitalism.
Nice that the legal precedent is now "Yes you can be" though.
Sure. In Canada.
Conveniently I live in Canada :D
But yeah, a similar US ruling would be nice
Not just the U.S. I'm seeing this as being something corporations will argue the world over, especially with AI.
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Par for the course for this airline, in my experience. They're allergic to responsibility.
I can’t wait for something like this to hit SCOTUS. We’ve already declared corporations are people and money is free speech, why wouldn’t we declare chatbots solely responsible for their own actions? Lmao 😂😂💀💀😭😭
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