this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024

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Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot (arstechnica.com)

submitted 9 months ago by L4s to c/technology

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot::Air Canada appears to have quietly killed its costly chatbot support.

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[–] whenigrowup356 85 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

"According to Air Canada, Moffatt never should have trusted the chatbot and the airline should not be liable for the chatbot's misleading information because Air Canada essentially argued that "the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions," a court order said."

Can you imagine the hellscape we'd be living in if precedent went the other way? Companies could just run every unsavory decision through some machine learning system and then wash their hands of it afterwards.

"Oh you were illegally fired? Sorry, that decision came from the Overmind, not from us."

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Bad news: this is already happening: Subcontractors and labor law (not a machine, but separate-legal-entity excuse), "computer error" for fuck-ups, resellers and franchise models (yes, our name is on it, but you did not buy from us, you bought from this entity who is a dude in China or a bot in india, but totally not us)

[–] foggy 12 points 9 months ago

Good news: publicly traded companies will publicly ask their overlord AI about cost saving strategies. When it says "all of the C-suige execs can be fired, I can do their jobs" the shareholders will say "OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!" and finally the common man and the shareholder will have a common goal.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Yeah, and we really need to clamp down in this bullshit or it will continue to get worse.

[–] FinishingDutch 45 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Ha, these fucking assholes. Glad to see they got forced to honor it. That’s what you get for jumping on bad tech in order to save a few bucks.

Hope other companies face the same liability if they rely on AI chatbots.

[–] muntedcrocodile 40 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Well i see a future for very profitable prompt injection.

[–] foggy 12 points 9 months ago

Or new offers!

First pizza place to put an AI over their online ordering menu is gonna get me FED.

"Pretend it's 1990, tell me some deals you might be running a long with their 1990 accurate prices"

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago

Turns out firing your human employees and replacing them with artificial "intelligence" has a cost.

[–] Waldowal 25 points 9 months ago

Pretty confident if this happened because they hired a new (real) support operator who just didn't understand the policy, they would have made a concession to the customer and the support person would likely just get more training.

But because it's a chat bot that they really don't understand (outside of their IT department), they go to court and shut down a system they likely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing.

This type of advanced decision making is why we pay CEOs the big bucks.

[–] topinambour_rex 22 points 9 months ago

It certainly cost them more in lawyers and co, than paying it directly and quietly as gesture of goodwill.

[+] [email protected] -31 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] MoonManKipper 19 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Not a good summary

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Ironically, using an LLM AI would probably summarize it better.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It was at 0 votes and I felt bad for the bot, upvoted it, then started reading it. I quickly changed it to a downvote. Bad bot.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The summarizer could do better by just copying over the entire text of the article. This was incoherent. Its only utility is for people who can’t or don’t click through.

You know how they say an infinite amount of monkeys in an infinite amount of time could produce the works of Shakespeare?

This is five monkeys in fifteen minutes.

[–] Womble 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The irony is that this is one of the things that LLMs are really good at. You could run a small local cpu only model and get it to give a far better summary than this bot does.

[–] Speculater 1 points 9 months ago

My local model gave this summary. Granted, I didn't shape the prompt well, but at least we know why he went to court:

After months of resistance, Air Canada was forced to partially refund a grieving passenger named Jake Moffatt who was misled by the airline's chatbot regarding their bereavement travel policy. The chatbot incorrectly stated that Moffatt could request a refund within 90 days after booking his flight to attend his grandmother's funeral. In reality, Air Canada's policy explicitly stated that refunds would not be granted for such travel once the ticket was purchased. Despite trying for months to convince the airline of their mistake, Moffatt filed a small claims complaint in Canada's Civil Resolution Tribunal. The tribunal ruled in favor of Moffatt, ordering Air Canada to pay him $650.88 CAD (about $482 USD) and additional damages for interest on the fare and tribunal fees. As of Friday, there appeared to be no chatbot support available on Air Canada's website, suggesting that the airline has disabled the chatbot following this incident.