But think of all of the money saved on customer service!
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.
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.
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.
Eh, there’s the legal concept of someone being an agent of the company. It wasn’t typically expected to take orders, nor was it tied into the order system it seems.
In the cases where the deal had to be honored, the bot had the ability to actually generate and place an order, and that was one of the primary things it did. The two cases that come to mind are a car dealership and an airline, where you could use it to actually place a vehicle order ornto find and buy flights.
As agents of the business, if they make a preposterous deal you’re stuck with it.A distinction can be made to stores where the person who comes up and offers to help you isn’t an agent of the business. They can use the sales computer to find the price, and they can look for a discount, but they can’t actually adjust the order price without a manager coming over to enter a code and do it.
In this case it sounds like someone did the equivalent of going to a best buy and talking to the person who helps you find the video games trying to get them to say something discount code-ish. Once they did, they said they wanted to redeem that coupon and threatened to sue.
It really hinges on if it was tied to the ordering system or not.
