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Comment on 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

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tiramichu@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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 if 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 being given an impossible deal due to a technical issue.

Simply:

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)

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drcobaltjedi@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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laughterlaughter@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It is an interesting discussion for sure.

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).

You are unintentionally moving the goal post. Your original argument was about “how reasonable is for a consumer to expect that certain offers are genuine.” The moral perspective is another different subject that could be discussed separately. Starting from, for example, “what do you mean by morality?” If a father is poor and his son is literally dying of starvation because the megacorps won’t hire him and the government failed him, then he can trick a chatbot, or a human being, to sell them food at $1, is he being immoral? But again, this is not part of the main discussion. So we should cast the moral part aside.

a human agent was involved and that gives the interaction the full support and faith of the company, from the customer perspective.

Why does this have to change with a chatbot? What makes a human so especial?

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.

Humans make mistakes - we all say that mistakes are part of being human. Can’t humans go rogue or have a bad day, or be particularly distracted at that moment? Airliners have collided mid-air due to human error, for example. I would not expect a customer representative to have the sharpness of a flight controller.

Let’s remember that Air Canada, replaced a human with a chatbot expecting the chatbot to outperform the human it replaced. Are you still on the side of the company knowing that?

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

You can’t tell me you’ve never offered anything for sale on a local marketplace. Sellers get hit all the time with arguments like “A PS5 for $250? I’ll buy it from you for $5 - my daughter has cancer and she needs it! If you don’t sell it to me for $5, you’re an evil, immoral person!” And those “buyers” believe, I repeat, believe they are in the right. This is why many listings have clauses like “The price is firm. No haggling. You will be ignored if you do this,” etc, etc.

So, if you don’t really think there are people out there thinking that an $1 airline ticket is not only possible, but mandatory, then I envy you because you haven’t interacted with enough humans online.

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- tiramichu@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Apologies if my comments appeared to be moving the goalposts. I am.absolutely not trying to talk about morality in a wider sense. If I was then this would be a whole different argument because I believe that corporations are unethical as all hell, and consumers are usually within their moral right to exploit them as hard as possible, because that barely even scratches how badly companies exploit their customers or damage wider society. But this is - as you point out - not about that.
  
  The aspect of morality I was interested in from the perspective of defining law is the very restricted aspect of whether the customer is acting in bad faith, knowing that they are getting a too-good-to-be-true deal, or whether they believe the offer made is legitimate.
  
  You ask what makes a human customer service represebtative so special, in comparison to a bot, and my answer there is simply that they are human
  
  Remember that my argument here is specifically about whether or not the customer believes the price they are being offered is genuine.
  
  Humans agents are special in that regard because they have a huge amount of credibility in reassuring and confirming with the other person that the offer is genuine and not a mistake. They can strongly reinforce the feeling of an offer being genuine.
  
  The law itself already (at least in the UK) distinguishes between prices presented (e.g. on a web page or the price on a shelf sticker) and direct agreements made with a person, recognising that mistakes are possible and giving the human ultimate authority.
  
  Really, this entire argument comes down to answering this: Should information given by a chatbot be considered to have the same authority and weight as information given by a person?
  
  My personal argument has been: “Yes, if it reasonably appears to the recipient as genuine, but no if the recipient might have reasonable cause suspect it is a mistake, knowing the information was provided by a computer system and that mistakes are possible.”
  
  For most people in this thread however, it seems (based on my downvotes) their feeling has been “Yes, it has the same authority always and absolutely”
  
  I can accept that I’m very much outvoted on this one, but I hope you can appreciate my arguments nonetheless.
  
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  - laughterlaughter@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Remember that my argument here, and the deciding factor, is specifically about whether or not the customer believes the price they are being offered is genuine.
    
    And that’s what happened in this case. The man thought the chatbot was giving him genuine information. “My family member is dying. Do you have a discount for bereavement situations?” The chatbot: [And I guarantee you, it did say this] “I’m so sorry you’re going through difficult times. Of course! Here’s what you need to do.” The customer is already in a turmoil of emotions, so we can’t really expect him to say “wait, this is too good to be true,” especially if that what he is asking precisely. It’s not like he is saying “can you put me on first class for free because I feel like it?” It’s literally “What’s your bereavement discount policy?” which is something airline companies do at their discretion. So, yes, the company must honor it.
    
    I do appreciate your comments.
    
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    tiramichu@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I agree that’s 100% what happened in this specific case. The customer had absolutely no reason to suspect the information they were given was bad, and the airline should have honoured the deal.
    
    A top-level comment on the post was also mine, by the way, in which I expressed the same and said “Shame on Air Canada for even fighting it.”
    
    Air Canada were completely and utterly wrong in this case, but I haven’t been talking about this case.
    
    All of my comments in this chain have been trying to discuss what determines, in the general case, which party is in the right when things like this happen.
    
    If it seemed I was arguing on this specific case then apologies for the confusion. It’s no surprise people would be so intensely against me if it seemed that way.
    
    There are cases like this Air Canada one where the customer is obviously in the right. We can also imagine hypothetical cases where I personally believe the customer would be in the wrong - for example if the customer intentionally exploit a flaw in the system to game a $1 flight - which is again obviously not what happened here, it’s just an example for that sake of argument.
    
    My fundamental point at the start of this comment chain was that I don’t actually think we need any new mechanism to determine who is right, because the existing mechanisms we already have in place to determine who is right between a company and a customer all still apply and work just the same regardless of whether it is AI or not AI.
    
    And the mechanism is, fundamentally, that the customer should always be considered right as long as they have acted in good faith.
    
    That’s why I’m very pleased with the ruling that Air Canada were wrong here and they can’t cop out of their responsibilities by blaming the AI.
    
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