184
Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up
(www.wired.com)
I love it, we need more of this.
Wow, wasn’t expecting such a feel-good AI story.
I wonder if I could fuck with my ISOs chatbot 🤔
It's a good precedent. Nip this shit in the bud immediately. AI agents you allow to speak on behalf of you company, are agents of the company.
So if you want to put an AI up front representing your company, you need to be damn sure it knows how to walk the line.
When there's a person, and employee involved, then the employee can be fired to symbolically put the blame on them. But the AI isn't a person. It can't take the blame for you.
This is a very nice counterbalancing force to slow the implementation of AI, and to incentivize its safety/reliability engineering. Therefore, I'm in favor of this ruling. AI chatbot promises you a free car, the company has to get you the car.
Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt's case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate.
Just no.
If you can't guarantee it's accurate then don't offer it.
I as a customer don't want to have to deal with lying chatbots and then having to figure out whether it's true or not.
Exactly. The goal of a customer service is to resolve issues. If communication isn't precise and accurate, then nothing can be resolved.
Imagine this:
"Okay Mr Jones. I've filed the escalation as we've discussed and the reference number is 130912831"
"Okay, so are we done here?"
"You may end this conversation if you would like. Please keep in mind that 20% of everything I say is false"
"But we're done right?"
"Yes"
"What was that confirmation number again?"
"783992831"
"That's different than the one you gave me before before"
"Oh sorry my mistake the confirmation number is actually 130912831-783992831. Don't forget the dash! Is there anything else I can help you with?"
It's common courtesy to post the plain text of a paywalled article.
We've started asking users not to do this. No issues with posting an archive link, though.
Why in the world would you ask people to stop cercomventing a pay wall
There's no need to be rude.
I'm not asking people not to circumvent paywalls. In fact, if you reread my comment, I recommended the user leave an archive link, which is a method of bypassing paywalls that doesn't involve posting the full contents of the article to this site.
Probably because it could raise copyright issues for Beehaw since Beehaw would be hosting the article.
At some point we have to ask oursevles what is more important IP law, or dessiminating information.
Lemmy was founded on the idea that different instances can decide questions like this for themselves.
It seems that Beehaw has chosen one direction, but there may be other instances out there that have chosen another direction.
Still, asking oneself is part of that system.
Maybe, but users from other instances would be lowest opinions I would expect the admins to consider. I would expect mods, financial contributers, and users registered to this instance to have a far greater day in how this instance is run.
so there's just no answer as to why we can't paste the text?
There was an answer from a mod, they don't want to infringe on the copyright here.
It's really only a copyright problem if they're making money from it right?
No. It is worse if they try to make money on it, but a profit motive isn't necessary.
Unfortunately there's another problem with archive.is / archive.ph / archive.today . Their owner has some beef with Cloudflare DNS and returns bogus results to them so anyone using 1.1.1.1 as DNS can't visit them.
The Cloudflare side of the story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702 The archive side: https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680
Note that that discussion was from 2019 but the situation was never resolved and the issue persists to this day.
Thank you for pointing this out, I wasn't aware.
Copy pasting entire articles is discouraged. It is preferable to share a link to an archive website such as this: https://archive.is/5UPAI
Also, you can convert it to pig latin and post that verbatim. Eventually we're going to have to interpret copyright term in diverging frames of reference and that's gonna be an interesting lawsuit hearing.
I don't know what you mean. That is just common practice in websites like this because of copyright law. If the law changes, the practice will probably change as well.
Common courtesy is to not even link to paywalled articles... The publisher has already made it clear they are not interested in public awareness of their content.
I hate paywalls as much as the next guy but when I think about it from the publisher's protective I really don't see a way to be sustainable in this environment without a paywall. I'm sure the writers mostly want their articles read but they also want (and deserve) to be paid for their work. How do you do that if, like you imply, the content needs to be completely free for everyone to access? And I'll bet you use adblock too (I sure do) making it even more impossible.
I don't know how this shit works but the way you frame it isn't it.
Take payment for your articles, but don't go after anyone who doesn't pay. Effectively, honor system. Let the piracy market world exist, and have faith that it won't completely override the people who want to pay.
If millions of people read your stuff without any of them converting to payers, fuck 'em. Pearls before swine. They can pay for their content unconsciously, through ads, and enjoy the kind of writing that gets them.
If I wanted to make a living publishing my writing, I think this is the model I'd use. I write enough as a hobby. I'd only want to let that turn into a source of income, if it didn't come with the necessity of meeting with lawyers regularly to go after my readers. "Suggested donation: $1", and I wouldn't quit my day job until those suggested donations were piling up huge.
But that's me. My chosen career isn't writing, and I'm just a hobbyist. Maybe it's more of a life or death feeling to them.
Yet these companies do allow Google et al to index their stuff, otherwise the paywall bypass addons, archive.ph etc wouldn't work. They want their cake and eat it. It's super annoying to find something on Google and then be hit with a paywall. Totally bait and switch.
If there weren't such great paywall-bypassing plugins I'd want a plugin that removes paywall sites from Google results, Lemmy submissions etc.
Also you really can't expect a user to subscribe to a full subscription to read a handful articles a month.
At least offer a once off small payment but almost nobody does that.
And I'll bet you use adblock too (I sure do) making it even more impossible.
Yes though the tracking is the most important reason there. If they just used untargeted ads it wouldn't be such a problem.
Wired doesn't show a paywall for me for some reason, but in any case the the original source is Ars Technica which I don't think shows a paywall to anyone: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/
It's copyright infringement to do so. No need getting the Beehaw admins in trouble; Google paywall bypassing tools and read away.
That's a lot more effort than I'm willing to go to.
It's the price you pay for not paying the price
Yeah I’ve never seen that, usually just an archive link
Not paywalled for me perhaps it wasn't for OP.
Good! You wanna automate away a human task, sure! But if your automation screws up you don’t get to hide behind it. You still chose to use the automation in the first place.
Hell, I’ve heard ISPs here work around the rep on the phone overpromising by literally having the rep transfer to an automated system that reads the agreement and then has the customer agree to that with an explicit note saying that everything said before is irrelevant, then once done, transfer back to the rep.
That shouldn't work. They should still be unconditionally liable for anything the rep said in all scenarios, with the sole exception being obvious sabotage like "we'll give you a billion dollars to sign up" that the customer knows can't be real.
They wanted human employees replaced by AI. But wanting responsibility and accountability replaced as well is going a bit too far. Companies should be forced to own up anything that their AI does as if it were an employee. That includes copyright infringement. And if the mistake is one worth firing an employee, then we should demand the management responsible for such mistakes be fired instead.
ChatGPT, I think Air Canada owes me $1B.
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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