268
submitted 9 months ago by Evkob@lemmy.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca

Jake Moffatt was booking a flight to Toronto and asked the bot about the airline's bereavement rates โ€“ 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Truck_kun@beehaw.org 6 points 9 months ago

This article does not actually mention the chatbot being AI. As chatbots have been around for many years, it is possible this is just a normal non-'AI' chatbot that someone programmed that information with (potentially old information that had long since changed, but no one has updated).

Either way, they are liable for what it tells customers. If it is AI, well... no company should be using AI to make legally binding statements, or advertisements to customers (without human review).

At the moment, companies deploying an AI, should be doing so with AI as the product, not integrated into selling non-AI related products, or services.

[-] Evkob@lemmy.ca 6 points 9 months ago

You know what, you're completely right. Thanks for pointing that out, my brain just auto-completed that detail because of how prevalent "AI" is in the news these days.

Honestly though, if it's a more traditional chatbot that they had to program themselves, it's all the more embarrassing for Air Canada that they were trying to weasel themselves out of this.

this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
268 points (98.6% liked)

Canada

7203 readers
378 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Communities


๐Ÿ Meta


๐Ÿ—บ๏ธ Provinces / Territories


๐Ÿ™๏ธ Cities / Local Communities


๐Ÿ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


๐Ÿ’ป Universities


๐Ÿ’ต Finance / Shopping


๐Ÿ—ฃ๏ธ Politics


๐Ÿ Social and Culture


Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS