I wonder if this will turn into a new attack vector against companies; talk their LLM chat bots into promising a big discount, take the company to a small claims court to cash out
Realistically (and unfortunately), probably not - at least, not by leveraging chatbot jailbreaks. From a legal perspective, if you have the expertise to execute a jailbreak - which would be made clear in the transcripts that would be shared with the court - you also have the understanding of its unreliability that this plaintiff lacked.
The other issue is the way he was promised the discount - buy the tickets now, file a claim for the discount later. You could potentially demand an upfront discount be honored under false advertising laws, but even then it would need to be a “realistic” discount, as obvious clerical errors are generally (depending on jurisdiction) exempt. No buying a brand new truck for $1, unfortunately.
If I’m wrong about either of the above, I won’t complain. If you have an agent promising trucks to customers for $1 and you don’t immediately fire that agent, you’re effectively endorsing their promise, right?
On the other hand, we’ll likely get enough cases like this - where the AI misleads the customer into thinking they can get a post-purchase discount without any suspicious chat prompts from the customer - that many corporations will start to take a less aggressive approach with AI. And until they do, hopefully those cases all work out like this one.
According to Air Canada, Moffatt never should have trusted the chatbot and the airline should not be liable for the chatbot’s misleading information because Air Canada essentially argued that “the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions,” a court order said.
“Air Canada argues it cannot be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants, or representatives—including a chatbot,” Rivers wrote.
The thing is, none of that is even slightly true; even if the chatbot were it’s own legal entity, it would still be an employee and air Canada are liable for bad advice given by their representatives
And Air Canada is free to sue the legal entity chat bot for damages after firing them all they like, after paying the customer their refund.
Though they might find out that AI chatbots don’t have a lot of money, seeing as they aren’t actually employees and they don’t pay them anything.
You’d be really hard pressed to make a case for civil liability against an employee, even in cases where they did not perform their duties in accordance with their training - unless they have actively broken the law, the most recourse you have is to fire them
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