this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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Apologies if my comments appeared to be moving the goalposts. I am not trying to talk about morality in a wider sense. If I was, this would be a whole different argument because I believe that corporations are generally unethical as all hell, and consumers are usually within their moral right to exploit them as hard as possible, because that barely even scratches how badly companies exploit their customers or damage wider society. But this is - as you point out - not about that.
The aspect of morality I was interested in from the perspective of defining law is the very restricted aspect of whether the customer is acting in bad faith, knowing that they are getting a too-good-to-be-true deal, or whether they believe the offer made is legitimate.
You ask what makes a human customer service representative so special, in comparison to a bot, and my answer there is simply that they are human
Remember that my argument here, and the deciding factor, is specifically about whether or not the customer believes the price they are being offered is genuine.
Humans agents are special in that regard because they have a huge amount of credibility in reassuring and confirming with the other person that the offer is genuine and not a mistake. They strongly reinforce the belief of an offer being legitimate.
The law itself already (at least in the UK) distinguishes between prices presented (e.g. on a web page or the price on a shelf sticker) and direct agreements made with a person, recognising that mistakes are possible and giving the human ultimate authority.
Really, this entire argument comes down to answering this: Should information given by a chatbot be considered to have the same authority and weight as information given by a person?
My personal argument has been: "Yes, if it reasonably appears to the recipient as genuine, but no if the recipient might have probable cause to suspect it is a mistake, knowing the information was provided by a computer system and that mistakes are possible."
For most people in this thread however, it seems (based on my downvotes) their feeling has been "Yes, it has the same authority always and absolutely"
I can accept that I'm very much outvoted on this one, but I hope you can appreciate my arguments.
And that's what happened in this case. The man thought the chatbot was giving him genuine information. "My family member is dying. Do you have a discount for bereavement situations?" The chatbot: [And I guarantee you, it did say this] "I'm so sorry you're going through difficult times. Of course! Here's what you need to do." The customer is already in a turmoil of emotions, so we can't really expect him to say "wait, this is too good to be true," especially if the answer aligns with what he is asking.
It's not like he is saying "can you put me on first class for free because I feel like it?" It's practically "What's your bereavement discount policy?" which is something airline companies do at their discretion. So, yes, the company must honor it.
I do appreciate your comments.
I agree that's 100% what happened in this specific case. The customer had absolutely no reason to suspect the information they were given was bad, and the airline should have honoured the deal.
A top-level comment on the post was also mine, by the way, in which I expressed the same and said "Shame on Air Canada for even fighting it."
Air Canada were completely and utterly wrong in this case - but I haven't been talking about this case! At least, I wasn't intending to!
If it seemed that way I can understand now why people were so vehemently against me.
My comments in this chain have all actually been trying to discuss how to determine, in the general case, which party is "in the right" when things like this happen.
There are cases like this Air Canada one where the customer is obviously right. We can also imagine hypothetical cases where I personally believe the customer would be in the wrong - for example if the customer intentionally exploited a flaw in the system to game a $1 flight - which is again obviously not what happened here, it's just an example for the sake of argument.
My fundamental point at the start of this comment chain was that I don't actually think we need any new mechanisms to work this out, because the existing mechanisms we already have in place to determine who is right between a company and a customer all still apply and work exactly the same regardless of whether it is AI or not AI.
And that mechanism is, fundamentally, that the customer should generally be considered right as long as they have acted in good faith.
That's why I'm very pleased with the ruling that Air Canada were wrong here and they cannot dodge their responsibilities by blaming the AI.
I'm honestly glad I can put the stress of this days-long comment chain behind me, since it seems we weren't even arguing about the same thing this whole time!
Haha, it really did seem like that.
What you say is reasonable, but that goes beyond a simple "non-human" system, as it can also happen with human beings (e.g. social engineering; didn't an individual sent 25 million dollars to a scammer a couple of weeks ago?)
So, should a company honor an absurd offer? Probably not. But the whole pain they get from irate customers will be well-deserved, as it's their fault for having a flawed solution to a problem that can be solved more effectively: a human operator, or a very good web site search bar.