Corporate IT here. You're assuming they're smart enough to budget for this. They aren't. They never are. Things are rarely if never implemented with any thought put into any other scenario that isn't happy path.

Better put Ryan Gosling on standby in case he needs to "retire" the rouge Air Canada chatbot Blade Runner style.

Oh, it is if they are using a dump integration of LLM in their Chatbot that is given more or less free reign. Lots of companies do that, unfortunately.

My 2024 bingo card didn't have a major corporation litigating in favor of AI rights in order to avoid liability, but I'm not disappointed to see it.

Because now they have to stop using the chatbot or take on the liability of having to pay out whenever it fucks up.

Most likely to fight the precedent of them being liable for using an ai chatbot that gives faulty information.

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.

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.

"See officer, we didn't make these deepfakes, the AI did. Arrest the AI instead"

That's what I thought of, at first. Interestingly, the judge went with the angle of the chatbot being part of their web site, and they're responsible for that info. When they tried to argue that the bot mentioned a link to a page with contradicting info, the judge said users can't be expected to check one part of the site against another part to determine which part is more accurate. Still works in favor of the common person, just a different approach than how I thought about it.

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.

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.

Nice that the legal precedent is now "Yes you can be" though.

Your honor, I'm not responsible for the petabytes of pirated content that my computer downloaded!

money is free speech

Can someone explain this to me? I assume this is in relation to campaign finance, but what was the actual argument that makes "(spending/accepting/?) money is free speech"?