This should calm the enthusiasm of AI aficionados. Air Canada recently pulled the plug on a chatbot who talked nonsense about the company’s promotions policies.
November 2022. After the death of his grandmother, Jake Moffat, a Canadian citizen living in Vancouver, goes to the Air Canada website to book a flight to Toronto to attend the funeral. During the reservation process, the man asks the chatbot on the site page how to take advantage of the preferential rate reserved for bereaved people. The little chat agent tells him that to obtain a refund, simply request it within 90 days of purchase. Problem, this procedure is completely bogus and a total hallucination on the part of the chatbot.
Justice: 1 – AI: 0
Logically therefore, once the refund request was sent by Jake Moffat, Air Canada did not honor it, indicating that the conditions for promoting “family emergency” flights were clearly detailed on the page to which the chatbot pointed and that the interpretation made by the conversational robot was erroneous. Determined not to be fooled by a software hallucination, Jake Moffat takes Air Canada to court in his country to, despite everything, obtain the reimbursement he was promised.
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Despite a valiant attempt at justification based on the argument that “the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions», Air Canada failed to convince the courts and had to reimburse part of Jake Moffat’s ticket as well as the legal costs incurred by the bereaved man.
The chatbot is not a separate legal entity
In the court decision published by the Canadian authorities, the court indicates that Air Canada’s defense is properly “amazing» and that the company is obviously responsible for “all information published on its site, whether it comes from a static web page or a chatbot.» Justice considers in fact that there was nowhere indicated the need to cross-reference information obtained on one page of the site via another page of the same site, especially since there was no way of knowing which of the information given was the most credible.
As noted by Ars Technica, Air Canada’s chatbot has since been deactivated despite grandiose statements from the company’s boss last March, who assured that this technology would “improve user experience“. So failed.
In 2023, the landscape of chatbots in French has expanded considerably, boosted by the rise of artificial intelligence. In the past, these assistants were rationed to predefined questions and answers. But now, thanks to advances like ChatGPT, it’s possible to ask any question and get relevant answers generated in real time.
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Source : Ars Technica
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