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On the day Jake Moffatt’s grandmother died, Moffat immediately visited Air Canada’s website to book a flight from Vancouver to Toronto.
In reality, Air Canada’s policy explicitly stated that the airline will not provide refunds for bereavement travel after the flight is booked.
Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Moffatt’s case appeared to be the first time a Canadian company tried to argue that it wasn’t liable for information provided by its chatbot.
Last March, Air Canada’s chief information officer Mel Crocker told the Globe and Mail that the airline had launched the chatbot as an AI “experiment.”
“So in the case of a snowstorm, if you have not been issued your new boarding pass yet and you just want to confirm if you have a seat available on another flight, that’s the sort of thing we can easily handle with AI,” Crocker told the Globe and Mail.
It was worth it, Crocker said, because “the airline believes investing in automation and machine learning technology will lower its expenses” and “fundamentally” create “a better customer experience.”
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Such a good and sane outcome. Not only am I happy for the affected customers, I’m also going to file this away in my bookmarks for later use.
One of the main concerns I bring up every time one of the managers wants to throw “AI” at something because it’s trendy is “who’s responsible when it just makes something up?”.
I know this is a Canadian ruling instead of a US one, but at least I can point to it and say “probably us”.
This guy was only saved because he saved the screenshots.
This may seem like overkill, but whenever I’m dealing with customer service for a significant financial concern, I always take detailed notes: time, date, name, what was discussed, and screenshots when relevant.
Just a few years ago a large appliance company tried to dick me around on a faulty product that was several thousand dollars.
It took weeks of back and forth, but when I was able to make contact with a layer of management just outside and above their customer service channel with my very long and detailed log of their bullshit, they authorized a check the next day.
Are screenshots even still considered evidence? They should be absolutely trivial to manipulate.
Yes, but submitting a manipulated screenshot in court is a whole different type of fraud and can carry whole different types of penalties than just claiming X happened when it was Y, so very reasonably puts the onus back on the company to look through their logs and try to prove what’s in your screenshots didn’t happen that way.
Yeah, I bet now we’ll be seeing some real people in chats while they scramble to cover their asses.
Good. I’m sure the chatbot will be back up and running soon, but anything that reminds companies there are risks to replacing humans with “AI-enhanced” chatbots is good. Unfortunately, I’m sure the lesson companies are going to take away from this is to include a disclaimer that the chatbot isn’t always correct. Which kind of defeats the whole point of using a chatbot to me. Why would I want to use something to try and solve a problem that you just told me could give me inaccurate information?
Expedia does it right. Just stop stupid customers at the brigade, and connect people with the real need immediately to real people.
Amazon is similar but the real people there are useless as fuck in my country. They’re foreign part timers barely speaking the language if my country… Can’t do anything specific.
