Jake Moffatt was booking a flight to Toronto and asked the bot about the airline’s bereavement rates – reduced fares provided in the event someone needs to travel due to the death of an immediate family member.
Moffatt said he was told that these fares could be claimed retroactively by completing a refund application within 90 days of the date the ticket was issued, and submitted a screenshot of his conversation with the bot as evidence supporting this claim.
The airline refused the refund because it said its policy was that bereavement fare could not, in fact, be claimed retroactively.
Air Canada argued that it could not be held liable for information provided by the bot.
If they get the precedent they are not responsible for what the AI chat bot says, then this goes for any chat box on any site and they all become worthless. Any chat bot gets a disclaimer basically saying “this thing is a dirty lier and nothing it says matters.” People will start to call human customer service to confirm what the chat bot said and the savings in employee costs are gone.
Seems a bad long term strategy.
It’s not a long term strategy. The person who made this decision is thinking about their quarterly or yearly bonus. By the time the problems hit, they’ve long since cashed out.
CS will be a multi modal chatbot too, just with a voice. I don’t think they want any human support at all. To a business, the only reason overhead exists is to cut it, and support has always been overhead.
Way, way fewer people will call CS than will just ignore the warning.
Once we become acclimated to things like this, we stop complaining, and let the greedy fuckers win.