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Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

I hope there can be some reasonable middle ground. I think in this case it's good the woman got her money. But Air Canada, presumably scared of what the next case might cost them decided to turn the chat bot off entirely. I think that's a bit unfortunate.

I don't know what the solution looks like. Maybe some combination of courts only upholding "reasonable" claims by AI. And then insurance to cover the gaps?

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If the company is not confident with the output of the chatbot or the liability then they should turn it off. All business decisions are based on assessing risk. Ultimately either insurance will need to step in or the company is willing to take the hit for mistakes their system makes because it saves them more money. This is how fraud protection it assessed with banks, credit cards etc. as well.

I agree. If bad information is given and the customer makes a decision on it, then either the customer must bear the risk or the business. I think it's more fair for the business to be out the money.

In this case this could have just been a $650 'bug bounty' had Air Canada issued a quick refund. A reasonable QA expense to find out that your AI agent is misleading your customers.

Hmm. “Let me turn on this lead water pipeline which may or may not poison an entire town and then blame faul when it does.”

I don’t think failing to take adequate precautions is preventing AI tools from being used. I think this was plain corporate incompetence and greediness. They started using a system without properly testing it and don’t want to pay for the consequences.

What if Boeing says “Oops. We forgot to put the bolts that keeps the door in place but we shouldn’t be kept accountable for our actions”? The fact that they used a tool for it shouldn’t change the outcome unless we are going to create indemnity for big cooperations.

>> "... turn the chat bot off entirely"

This sounds like an ideal outcome!

Why is that unfortunate? I honestly don't think there's any value in using AI for this if it's not guaranteed to give you correct answer.

I think that there can be an error rate that is low enough to still be very useful and a net-positive for the economy. But if there is a small chance to just end the company on the spot, then no one will use it despite the benefits. So how can we have the good parts without the bad, this is my question.

I guess the onus is on people to prove that using AI specifically is somehow a net-positive for the economy because that's in no way a given. But I don't feed good about Air Canada trying to make that case.

The "reasonable" middle ground is that chatbots should not be used unless and until their answers are reliable.

I don't see why chatbots can't be kept to the same standard as human staff. If an airline support agent lied to me to sell me tickets, no shit I'd want a refund and compensation! Chatbots should be allowed to be wrong, but the company should be prepared to face the consequences of that.

I struggle to comprehend how it's "unfortunate" that they turned off the customer support bot that lied to people.

Ideally they would fix it rather than give up on the idea entirely.

Or just hire a customer service department. That worked fine for the last hundred or so years.

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