You must log in or # to comment.
Good.
If a customer service agent made this discount offer and took the order, it would naturally have to be honoured - because a human employee did it.
Companies currently are getting away with taking the useful (to them) parts of AI, while simultaneously saying “oh it’s just a machine it makes mistakes, we aren’t liable for that!” any time it does something they don’t like. They are having their cake and eating it.
If you use AI to replace a human in your company, and that AI negotiates bad deals, or gives incorrect information, you should be forced to be liable for that exactly the same as if a human did it.
Would that mean businesses are less eager to use AI? Yes it fucking would, and that’s the point.
I placed an online order and used a coupon code I got from some browser extension. The seller refused to ship the item to me until I gave them more money because they said the free shipping code was meant for internal use only & not for customers.
In that particular case, I’d suggest the seller was within their rights, honestly.
If the code wasn’t obtained through any official means provided by the seller, then the seller has no responsibility to honour it, even it happens to ‘work’ in their checkout.
But the seller was obviously stupidly petty, and that feels pretty pathetic on their part.
They should have just sent your stuff, and taken the experience as notice to replace the voucher code that got leaked, so it doesn’t happen again.
If a customer service agent made this discount offer and took the order, it would narurally have to be honoured - because a human employee did it.
This isn’t actually true. Even with a written contract (that the original poster doesn’t state) if there’s a genuine mistake in the pricing that the purchaser should have reasonably noticed you don’t have to honour the price offered.
Imagine someone called a customer service agent and manipulated them into offering a price that they shouldn’t have offered through some sort of social engineering, you as the employer wouldn’t have to honour that contract, especially if you have evidence of that through a recorded phone call for instance.
If there is evidence of a fraud - yes.
If I asked you for a big discount and you offered me 80% discount - I see no issue here. Doesn’t look like an “obvious mistake”.
The OP went into more detail in the reddit comments:
Chatbot isn’t supposed to be making financial decisions. It’s supposed to be answering customer questions between 6pm and 9am when I’m not around.
It’s worked fine for 6+ months, then this guy spent an hour chatting with it, talked it into showing how good it was at maths and percentages, diverted the conversation to percentage discounts off a theoretical order, then acted impressed by it.
The chatbot then generated him a completely fake discount code and an offer for 25% off, later rising to 80% off as it tried to impress him.
deploy stupid code win stupid prizes.
Still sounds like the AI is an idiot and did and said thing it shouldn’t. But it still did it and as a representative of a company should still be held to the same standards as an employee. Otherwise it’s fraud. Nobody hacked the system, the customer was just chatting and the “employee” fucked up and the owner can take it out of their pay… oh right it’s a slave made to replace real paid humans.
The “AI” isn’t an idiot.
It isn’t even intelligence, nor, arguably, artificial (since LLM models are grown, not built).
It’s just a fancy autocomplete engine simulating a conversation based on statistical information about language, but without any trace of comprehension of the words and sentences it’s producing.
It’s working as correctly as it possibly can, the business was simply scammed into using a tool (a toy, really) that by definition can’t be suited for the job they intended it to do.
Artificial Idiot
I don’t disagree, but this is an issue of when/where it’s appropriate to use an LLM to interact with customers and when they shouldn’t. If you present an LLM to the public, it will get manipulated by people who are prepared to in order to get it to do something it shouldn’t.
This also happens with human employees, but it’s generally harder to do so it’s less common. This sort of behaviour is called social engineering and is used by fraudsters and scammers to get people to do what they want, typically handing over their bank details, but the principal is the same, you’re manipulating someone (or something in this case) into getting it do do something they/it shouldn’t.
Just because we don’t like the fact that the business owner deployed an LLM in a manner they probably shouldn’t have, doesn’t mean the customer isn’t the one in the wrong and themself voided whatever contract they had through their actions. Whether it’s a human or LLM on the other end of the chat doesn’t actually make any difference.
Don’t give a flying fuck what you think your bot should do. Your public facing interface gives a discount, I take a discount, simple as.
If a human offered an 80% discount, the humans employer isn’t magically forced to honor it.
Firstly, it depends whether the offer satisfies the criteria of “an offer” in a legal sense. Unless purchases for 8,000 GBP are generally negotiated in a chat window on a website then this kinda seems unlikely. Anyhow, let’s assume it is an actual “offer”.
If the offeror renegs on the contract, they may be liable to a claim from the buyer for the costs incurred by they’ve incurred as a result of the bogus purchase.
For example, if the buyer dispatched a truck to the vendors warehouse and on arrival they were told the sale wouldn’t go through, then the vendor might be liable for the cost of the delivery truck for a few hours.
In reality, no one is going to bother making a legal claim for that small amount of money.
No problem. Just sue your AI assistant for negligence.
Make that AI regret its decision to power fuck your company.
But think of all of the money saved on customer service!
. <---- Do you see this violin? It is what I am playing for you now.
This makes me so happy. Based customer.
edit: sadly it wasn’t like the original post made it sound like:
Code wasn’t accepted. He copy/pasted his [fake, hallucinated by AI] code into the order comments section when he paid his deposit. He demanded the figures be adjusted for his discount code.
Bummer
Wasn’t there a car dealer in NA who had a similar issue? That was at least a year ago and even back then it was obvious the dealer had to honor the deal of the chat agent
Yeah some Chevrolet dealer, the guy didn’t get the car however.
Thanks for linking it! Too bad the hacker never got their car for $1. I believe with enough pressure, they would have achieved that, but they were obviously acting in good faith.
You people.
You are pissed off at billion dollar multinationals using AI to do shitty stuff. But because they are untouchable for you you are celebrating some solo business person that is likely making less than minimum wage getting fucked over because they wanted to have the weekend off for once instead of answering support requests. You don’t care if you’re kicking up or down, you just want to kick.
Agreed.
“Big bad wolf blew my house down so i kick every puppy I come across”
aww da poor widdle business owner choosing to not provide real customer service experiencing consequences of his actions 🥺
