3 responses to “AI chatbot subscriptions – worth $20 a month?”

1. 

   jph

   2/18/2024

   

   So, this article is a caution regarding businesses wishfully rolling out AI customer-facing agents – whether to alleviate resource shortfalls or explore high tech. In this case, an airline was sort of winging it. Piecemeal. And the liability thing.

   • Wired > “Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up” by Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica (Feb 17, 2024) – Air Canada essentially argued, “the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions,” a court order said.

   The chatbot provided inaccurate information, encouraging [passenger] Moffatt to book a flight immediately and then request a refund within 90 days. … Unhappy with this resolution, Moffatt refused the coupon and filed a small claims complaint in Canada’s Civil Resolution Tribunal.

   Tribunal member Christopher Rivers, who decided the case in favor of Moffatt, called Air Canada’s defense “remarkable.”

   … Rivers found that Moffatt had “no reason” to believe that one part of Air Canada’s website would be accurate and another would not.

   Air Canada “does not explain why customers should have to double-check information found in one part of its website on another part of its website,” Rivers wrote.

   When Ars visited Air Canada’s website on Friday, there appeared to be no chatbot support available, suggesting that Air Canada has disabled the chatbot.

2. 

   jph

   2/19/2024

   

   What’s the relationship between thinking -> technology -> comprehension (reasoning) -> writing and effective communication? To broader goals, both personal and collective. To deep discussion of issues (beyond either-or political speech). What happens when large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are standard academic and research tools?

   • Caltech > News > “Large Language Models in the Classroom” by Cynthia Eller (February 14, 2024)

   In the fall 2023 term, Professor of Philosophy Frederick Eberhardt took the somewhat controversial step of allowing his students full use of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT in their written assignments. His Ethics & AI class not only wrestled with ethical concerns raised by artificial intelligence but experimented with the use of text-based generative AI to better understand how these tools work and what a future world that includes them might look like.

   Key points

   • Responsibility for the correctness and appropriateness of any language or images created by a generative AI tool.
   • Disclosure / detection of use of generative AI.
   • Developing / modeling writing skills.
   • Regulation of generative AI (as a policy question).

   By the middle of the term, Eberhardt says, “we hit a plateau with several students returning to doing more of their writing on their own, while LLMs were used now principally as sophisticated search engines.” At the end of the term, Eberhardt “received several outstanding term projects, that, to the best of my judgment, were more than either the students or the machine could have done on their own.

3. 

   jph

   2/24/2024

   

   Oops, Gemini’s not so advanced, eh.

   • PC Mag > “Google Pauses Gemini’s Image Generation of People to Fix Historical Inaccuracies” by Kate Irwin (Feb 21, 2024) – Do AI-generated images have to be historically accurate, down to the racial identity of the characters created?

   UPDATE 2/22: Early Thursday morning, Google said it had disabled Gemini’s ability to generate any images of people. A quick PCMag test of Gemini on a Mac using the Chrome browser today delivered the following message when Gemini was asked to create an image of a person, historical or otherwise: “We are working to improve Gemini’s ability to generate images of people. We expect this feature to return soon and will notify you in release updates when it does.”