Hello dear friend, it’s Ben from Dixon.ai here.
I just want to genuinely thank you for subscribing and being here so we can travel this journey of figuring out how to make sure our AIs are telling the truth together. I hope you enjoy Edition 2 and as always I’d love to hear your personal examples of your AIs telling you fibs, just hit reply.
Onto the story.
Air Canada’s website chatbot told a customer they could book a full-price flight and claim the cheaper bereavement rate back afterwards. Their grandmother had died that day.
They couldn’t. No such rule existed.
So they took the airline to a tribunal, and this is where it gets good.
Air Canada’s defence was that it could not be held responsible for what its own chatbot had said. It did not explain why. The tribunal member’s summary of that argument was that the airline was, in effect, suggesting the chatbot was a separate legal entity, responsible for its own actions.
Then this:
This is a remarkable submission. While a chatbot has an interactive component, it is still just a part of Air Canada’s website. It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website. It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot.
You can hear the pen going down.
The airline was ordered to pay CA$812.02. It had earlier offered a $200 coupon.
Now the bit nobody quotes.
The chatbot’s wrong answer had a link in it. The words “bereavement fares”, underlined, clickable, going to Air Canada’s own bereavement page. That page said the opposite. The right answer was sitting one click inside the wrong one, wearing a citation, and nobody opened it.
That is the exact thing I keep catching the assistants doing. I put six ordinary questions to five of them and opened every source they named. Three sent me somewhere that did not say what they had just told me. One sourced a driving fine to Police.uk, which is the site for finding your local force and looking at crime maps. Right fine. Wrong building entirely.
A chatbot is the company talking
That is the thing worth taking from a small claims case in British Columbia. Whatever a company’s help bot tells you, a refund window, a delivery date, a fee that supposedly does not apply, that is the company telling you. A tribunal has now put it in writing.
So hold them to it. And take a picture while you are there, because the transcript sits on their side of the screen and not yours.
And the newest thing on the site, if you want it: I graded the free prompt I give away, and on one question it made the answer worse. I graded my own prompt to stop AI hallucinations.
Ben
Forward this to someone who treats a link as proof.