Oh good, we've entered into the "we can't be held responsible for what our machines do" age of late-stage capitalism.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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Your honor, I'm not responsible for the petabytes of pirated content that my computer downloaded!
Nice that the legal precedent is now "Yes you can be" though.
Sure. In Canada.
Conveniently I live in Canada :D
But yeah, a similar US ruling would be nice
Not just the U.S. I'm seeing this as being something corporations will argue the world over, especially with AI.
A computer can never be held responsible so a computer must never make management decisions
- IBM in the 80s and 90s
A computer can never be held responsible so a computer must make all management decisions
- Corporations in 2025
Hey dumbasses maybe don't let a loose llm represent your company if you can't control what it's saying. It's not a real person, you can't throw blame to a non sentient being.
That's an important precedent. Many companies turned to LLMs to cut the cost and dodge any liability for whatever model can say. It's great that they get rekt in the court.
If you type "biz" instead of "business" in the first couple of lines, surely you're not expecting me to actually keep reading?!
Funnily enough, I thought the article was written by AI. I guess they trained it off something, lol
That's just "El Reg's" style; they've been that way for years. Don't let their pseudoinformality fool you, though, they know their stuff.
Yeah, you mean they've been getting worse for years! Would expect better from a UK based publication that isn't a tabloid, tbh
I went ahead and read it anyway. I actually had to Google the last word of the article: natch. It's slang for "naturally". We're living in interesting times. Glad the guy got compensated after going through that ordeal.
Why would air Canada even fight this? He got a couple hundred bucks and they paid at least 50k in lawyer fees to fight paying those. They could have just given him the cost of the lawyer's fees and be done with it
Most likely to fight the precedent of them being liable for using an ai chatbot that gives faulty information.
A settlement would cost less, can be kept private, and doesn't set precedent. Now they have an actual court case judgement, and that does set precedent.
I think some companies have a policy of fighting every lawsuit and making everything take as long as possible, simply to discourage more lawsuits.
Because there is something far nastier in the world than self interest. This airline seems to me like it was operating from a place of spite.
It's a corporation. Of course it's operating from a place of spite.
Just how Air Canada does things now. I think it largely stemmed from the pandemic where people gave them leeway on things being a bit messed up. But now they've fallen into a habit of not taking responsibility for anything.
Because now they have to stop using the chatbot or take on the liability of having to pay out whenever it fucks up.
Which is fascinating, that they themselves thought there was any doubt about it, or they could argue such a doubt.
This is the same like arguing "It wasn't me who shot the mailmen dead. It was my automated home self defense system"
Agree 100%--i mean who are you gonna fine, the bot? The company that sold you the bot? This is a simple case of garbage in, garbage out--if they set it up properly and vetted its operation, they wouldn't be trying to make such preposterous objections. I'm glad this went to court where it was definitively shut down.
Fuck Canada Air. The guy already lost a loved one, now they wanna drag him through all this over a pittance? To me, this is the corporate mindset--going to absolutely any length necessary to hoover up more money, even the smallest of scraps.
Par for the course for this airline, in my experience. They're allergic to responsibility.
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