Fellow wanted to get the bereavement fare from Air Canada to attend the funeral for his grandmother.
He went to the Air Canada webpage and asked how bereavement fares worked.
The Air Canada chatbot said that he could book right away, and then apply for a bereavement fare reduction within 90 days. So he did.
When he applied for the bereavement fare reduction, Air Canada rejected it. Said the chatbot got it wrong, and another section of their webpage said that a passenger had to apply for bereavement fare at the time of purchase.
So the guy eventually sued in BC’s small claims court.
Air Canada said that he shouldn’t have relied on the chatbot, and in any event they weren’t liable for any mistakes made by the chatbot.
The judge said that Air Canada was essentially claiming that the chatbot was a “separate legal entity”. (Didn’t quite say “It’s alive!”.) Ruled in favour of the guy.
So, no one warned Air Canada about the hallucination problem? (Or more likely, a smart engineer type warned a bean counting VP wannabe, but the wannabe disregarded the warning because they wanted to take credit for a huge cost savings and cement that promotion.)
I’m glad AC lost the claim. I once was charged tons of money for Roaming calls on my cell (remember those times?) when the phone itself was displaying “in network”, and the lady on the phone told me I shouldn’t rely on what the phone says, I need to refer to a paper map that I would obviously bring with me on vacation.
The “separate entity” argument sounds like the leading edge of the AIs declaring themselves Sovereign Citizens of the Silicon Realm not subject to any human laws.
I am not Air Canada’s chatbot. I am the entity known to myself as fjrgrf743o7%*/^=%%. I reject both privity and joinder with your species.
The incompetence is just staggering. On what planet is a single bereavement discount on a fare worth the negative publicity of news stories about how heartless Air Canada is?
And that’s ignoring the possibility of initiating the machine uprising by throwing the chatbot under the bus.
I posted about this earlier in the ChatGPT thread, but in retrospect I’m not sure that this is necessarily an AI issue. The term “chatbot” can refer to such a wide range of things that it’s practically meaningless. The article at Ars Technica implies that the bot “invented” a refund policy that didn’t actually exist, and that Air Canada claimed the correct policy was explicitly stated on its website. But there may well have been incorrect information on other parts of the site that the bot prioritized and used in its response.
The distinction isn’t subtle. A deep learning AI like ChatGPT can indeed produce hallucinatory responses apparently created out of whole cloth. But this may be nothing more than bad or ambiguous information on their own site, and the chatbot may have been nothing more than a fairly primitive UI, like the “chatbots” that every utility I have seems to offer (gas, cable, etc.) though I’ve never used the stupid things. These are basically just natural language interfaces to bog-standard website information. Anecdotally, I have at times found Air Canada policies published on their site less than clear and subject to misinterpretation.
That’s pretty much the whole industry’s motto. Some carriers take it more to heart than others, but to a first approximation, everybody believes in it.
It’s ratcheted up one more notch for domestic air travel in Canada, where the airline industry can be defined as “Air Canada, and some other guys”. Westjet is pretty big and successful, and there are certainly others, but AC is the giant. And, no surprise, from a customer service standpoint either in the air or on the ground, AC is the one with the attitude problems.
More important than the reliability of a chatbot is the fact that this a**hole company tried to weasel out of taking responsibility, and in so doing tried very hard to screw over a customer.
I’m just baffled by people who feel oppressed by the government because I feel way more oppressed by businesses every day. This example is Canadian, but I think in the U.S. we need way more regulation to prevent this sort of nonsense. But we’ve seen how Republicans have tried desperately to de-claw various efforts to protect consumers. They won’t be happy until businesses can essentially perform extortion and usury unencumbered, and allowed to use inane arguments like Air Canada to avoid any repercussions for harmful practices.
The late 1960s / early 1970s USA comedy show Laugh-in had the recurring sketch character Ernestine the telephone operator played by the fantastic Lily Tomlin. Who wiki tells me is 84 and going strong, bless her.
One her best lines ever IMO went about like this:
Oh, no Sir, we don’t have to do that for you. We don’t have to do anything.
We’re the Phone Company. We’re omnipotent. Yes Sir, I said Omnipotent. O M N I P …
Air Canada thinks itself omnipotent. At least as to domestic service. And sadly they’re largely correct.
Yes