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I worked for 5 years in an insurance call center. Most people believe call centers are designed to deliberately waste your time so you just hang up and don't bother the company; there is nothing I could say that would dissuade you of this, because I believe it too.
In the future, we're all going to be stuck wrestling with AI chatbots that are nothing more than a stalling tactic; you'll argue with it for an age trying to get a refund or whatever and it'll just spin away without any capability to do anything except exhaust you, and on the off chance you do have it agree to refund you the company will just say "Oh, that was a bug in the bot, no refunds sorry!" and the whole process starts again.
A lot of people think about AI and wonder how good it'll get, but that is the wrong question. How bad will companies accept is the more prescient one.
Had to do it once with Sony and another time with an electronics insurance company. Money was back in my account in less than 24h.
In some countries I've lived, the government has refused to do anything against companies refusing a refund for various things, even if the conditions for the refund is matching. In other countries, I've had very helpful government people issuing a "letter of concern" (not sure exact translation) and the companies doing the refund quickly after that.
Not sure that if you have no prior agreement with someone that you can force them to not sue and use arbitration instead. Not a lawyer, but that is my understanding (in the USA anyway)
Chat bots all the way down.
The problem is that these companies are monopolies or at least oligopolies. Punish them simply for being big, and they will either divide (like living cells do) or die. Then when one of them wastes your time, you can take your business to the next one.
Government is never going to fix these things. Politicians are geniuses at saying things that make you think they will fix these problems, but never actually doing it. The only hope is to align our needs (smaller corporations) with the government's needs (moar tax dollars). It's really quite simple.
Say it with me, kids:
Graduated. Corporate. Income. Tax.
Decades ago I "acquired" SUN microsystems by negotiating with a clickwrap agreement that was an editable text box-- they even sent me back the revised terms! (Technically they agreed to pay me substantially for using their software and reporting bugs, which I did... and eventually per the terms I owned the whole thing. :P )
When Oracle later went acquire them I considered writing in and bringing their attention to out contract. But then I there was some slim chance they might actually pay me to go away, people extort companies in even dumber ways, which seemed far too gross so I didn't do it.
[Though I have no doubt that Oracle would happily enforce some absurd agreement against anyone they thought was good for some money...]
This raises all kinds of interesting legal issues that have no obvious resolution:
* can agency be delegated to an LLM?
* can an LLM create a contract on behalf of itself? another? an organization?
* does the answer change if the person(s) or organization(s) want the LLM to be able to form contracts?
* are contracts created by an LLM bound by the statute of frauds?
* what happens with unspecified contract terms given that an LLM has perfect knowledge of the UCC?
* does the parol rule apply to the LLM conversation prior to the formation of a contract?
And on and on. Law students all over the world are busy writing law review articles about these questions.
* You can't actually delegate agency to a computer. The Restatement of the Law of Agency says an agent must be a person.
* No, an LLM is not a human, so it can't make contracts in any respect.
* If you agree in an actual contract to be bound by the black box of the LLM, then the LLM will govern the terms thereof. You could theoretically make an unconditional offer to agree to such a contract if you really wanted to.
* Any electronic record is a writing for the statute of frauds, so unless you're piping your LLM to TTS to their speakers without any record, it should satisfied as a written memo in the above case when you really want to have ChatGPT sell your house.
* Again, LLMs can't form contracts. If the company actually accepted a customer's offer, they'd look at the intents of each actual party and parol evidence. What the LLM "knows" is irrelevant.
* It's hard to imagine a scenario where an LLM is involved in an integrated contract.
It is rather interesting to imagine how a court would handle a scenario where a customer actually thinks they are making a contract with a company through a chatbot though. Generally anything a computer does is just going to be seen as preliminary negotiations. When the customer "agrees" with the computer, it's legally the customer making an offer to the company, which then accepts the contract when they actually perform the contract/ship the order. I could see in some cases how companies could be bound by some form of reliance or quantum meruit or dinged for false advertising.
> an LLM is not a human, so it can't make contracts in any respect
Probably the most contentious question relates to AI inventorship, which is disallowed under Thaler v. Vidal (Fed. Cir. 2022), but is already laughably out of date with respect to the technology. The decision draws a similarly hard line regarding whether an inventor must be a human or not based on statutory interpretation.
But the patent office will soon be inundated with AI-authored or AI-assisted inventions, if they aren't already. Applicants will simply just not admit it or possibly opt for trade secret protection instead. Meanwhile, other countries may not take such a hard line, and that IP will make its way to China or the EU or wherever.
Of course this is all science fiction right now, since it's an open question as to whether an LLM will invent anything useful, but it's not implausible. My point is that I believe the question will be revisited very soon.
But...
> you agree in an actual contract to be bound by the black box of the LLM, then the LLM will govern the terms thereof.
This implies you can have a standing offer of a contract on the terms articylated5 by the LLM, with some specified method of acceptance, which suggests a different outcome than the “preliminary negotiations” you suggest for a contract where the LLM system is the frontend of the cobtract5 negotiation, provided that the reason that the outside party thought they were negotiating a cobtract with the company via thr LLM is that offer by the company.
Does Amazon manually review every purchase made on their site? This seems not to be true at least for some contracts.
The rest seem to fall along a similar vein. If you believe software cannot act as an agent for a corporation in creating sales contracts, then similarly it should follow that what you're suggesting is true -- LLMs cannot act as an agent.
But we know that is not the case in some circumstances.
>Do you think that if you use your phone's autocomplete to make an offer to a customer it is somehow not binding?
Once again, just because ChatGPT said it, doesn't mean it's actually legally binding. This would be thrown out of court. It's no different than changing your name to "Free Chevy" and then claiming you're owed a free vehicle because those exact words appeared on the website.
Okay, and? If I put "Powered by GBoard" on my emails they are suddenly not binding?
This is as obviously non-binding as anything could possibly be. All the dealership has to do is say "no, we don't sell cars at that price".
The conclusion is that you probably shouldn't trust ChatGPT to represent your company.
I think it's ridiculous to use ChatGPT for things like customer support. This time it's someone writing a basic prompt and expecting the AI to do what it says, but next time it could very well be someone who's unfamiliar with ChatGPT (remember that lawyer that thought ChatGPT was a search engine, and when confronted by the judge about made-up cases, doubled down and asked ChatGPT if ChatGPT was telling the truth?) who honestly believes they're haggling over a car with a real representative. Best case scenario they feel cheated by the company, worst case scenario a judge forces the company to honour the deal.
Every law student learns about this case in Contracts during their first year of law school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.
I'm sure some people said there obviously was no contract then either, but it was litigated at some length in federal court.
With respect to US common law, unless there is a statute or case "on point," it's potentially an open field.
A lot of AI-related litigation is happening right now to begin to settle some of these issues.