I just can't believe it took a lawsuit to get an airline to fork over a few hundred bucks on something that was obviously their fault.
https://www.businessinsider.com/car-dealership-chevrolet-cha...
In the Air Canada case, it was a clear good-faith effort to understand the rules of a fare he was legitimately entitled to.
There are lots of things that an employee might say that would not be reasonable, even if they had no malicious intent.
"Generally, the applicable standard of care requires a company to take reasonable care to ensure their representations are accurate and not misleading."
"I find Air Canada did not take reasonable care to ensure its chatbot was accurate."
"Mr. Moffatt says, and I accept, that they relied upon the chatbot to provide accurate information. I find that was reasonable in the circumstances."
What is described here do happen when employees send mails with explicit promises, but gets harder when only the company has proof of the exchange (recording of the call). Chatbots bridge that gap.
But Chat Bots often provide a "Save transcript" feature, or even default to emailing you a copy if you're in a Customer Service type environment where it knows your email. So those are both a lot easier than setting up call recording.
This is an appropriate outcome, in my view. I'm as pro-AI as they come. But I also recognize that without a clear standard of service delivery, and in an industry inundated with M&A instead of competition, that a chatbot isn't a helpful thing but a labor cost reduction initiative.
Good.
Of course the argument is absurd, but this is exactly where companies like this would love to go. Virtually free support staff that incur the company absolutely no liability whatsoever.
It's literally just corporate ignorance as a business strategy. What's sad is, on the large, it works in their favor.
In any case, it's an equally good signal that you don't want to fly with them.
It seems a little weird to be able to (and also practically do) rule differently in the same situation
They may consider precedent rulings as factors in the decision, but those earlier rulings themselves do not automatically become law for all future cases on the same subject.
Not quite that simple. The word we use is jurisprudentie but it means the same. Opening up the Dutch Wikipedia article and clicking on the English version of the article with thst name, you end up with "Case law, also used interchangeably with common law, is a law that is based on precedents"
I dove into this when I first heard of the difference between continental law and common law, and found it to be mostly a matter of wording. The principles are opposite but the effects very similar. It's not as though common law countries have no politicians making legislation, or as though there is no precedence in continental law countries.
Dutch foundational law (I think the very first article) says "everyone is treated equally given equal circumstances": such an equality principle would be incompatible with different rulings in identical situations. I imagine most countries have equality as a foundational principle, hence I'd be interested to learn: In which country would rulings not set precedence?
No two court cases are completely identical. Precedents are an important reference but they themselves do not automatically decide the outcome in civil law jurisdictions