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<\/p>\nWhen I was a geeky kid, reading all sorts of science fiction, the idea of advanced artificial intelligences came up often. Sometimes in the form of robots, sometimes in the form of a computer without a robotic body, but always something thought provoking as these synthetic brains breached the boundaries of sentience and started to grapple with the mysteries of identity and what it means to be something aware of one\u2019s self. They asked what this thing called \u201clove\u201d is or wished to experience laughter or something equally profound.<\/p>\n
What they almost never did was make buyback deals on used BMWs that would later be reneged upon.<\/p>\n
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And yet, here in our stupid reality, that\u2019s what AI is actually doing, when it\u2019s not too busy giving you bad advice or putting pictures of famous people you find online in skimpy clothes. This particular situation, CBC writes, happened<\/a> at the BMW Toronto<\/a> dealership, when 2021 BMW X3 XDrive 30i owner Zack Giacomelli, displeased from having to do expensive repairs on the car, decided to reach out to BMW Toronto to see if they were interested in buying the car back.<\/p>\n Happily, they were! At least, according to BMW Toronto\u2019s online representative, named Quinn.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Quinn offered $27,162.79 for the BMW, covering the remaining balance on the car, with \u201cno money owing, and no cash back,\u201d according to texts with Quinn that Giacomelli shared with CBC<\/a>. Giacomelli was very happy with this offer, and for the hell of it made a counteroffer of $28,000, which Quinn allegedly stated \u201csounds reasonable.\u201d Quinn even allegedly suggested that Giacomelli come by the dealership to \u201clock in today at 3:30.\u201d<\/p>\n Everyone should be happy, right? A deal is about to be struck!<\/p>\n Well, not quite. According to CBC,<\/p>\n \u201cMoments later, Giacomelli said, a BMW Toronto sales consultant called to revoke the offer, explaining that Quinn wasn\u2019t a real person, but rather an artificial intelligence<\/a> chatbot that had made the offer in error.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Why did the dealership allegedly rescind the offer? Because Quinn is not a human being: Quinn is an AI chatbot.<\/p>\n This of course brings up that perennial philosophical question: so what?<\/p>\n Yes, Quinn is an AI, but it\u2019s also acting on behalf of the dealership, and customers who interact with Quinn have no way of knowing if Quinn is man or machine; just ask Alan Turing<\/a> about that.<\/p>\n Giacomelli brings up an excellent point about all of this, telling CBC:<\/p>\n \u201cIf they\u2019re going to be replacing their employees\u2019 jobs with AI, then they need to be honouring what that AI says.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Mr. Giacomelli, I couldn\u2019t agree more.<\/p>\n You can\u2019t have it both ways; a business can\u2019t automate a job that was formerly a person with authority to make deals like this and then decide that no, what this machine says while operating as an agent of the dealership cannot be taken as actual, binding interactions with the dealership, like what the human agents they replaced did. How the hell is a customer supposed to know that? And if the AI will say things that aren\u2019t actually what the dealership intends to do, then what\u2019s the point of the damn AI?<\/p>\n If a human employee had made a deal like this, the dealership could likely have to honor it, or at the very least consider it. Just as a human can be an idiot and make bad decisions, an AI can be an idiot as well, and perhaps even could execute idiocy with efficiencies and speeds no human could hope to match.<\/p>\n An AI chatbot may be able to interact convincingly with a customer, but it fundamentally does not understand what it\u2019s doing. It has no idea what cars actually are or how much money is actually worth or, well, anything about life in the world, really. It\u2019s a bunch of branching conditionals and massive databases that delivers the\u00a0illusion of sentience. The reality is it doesn\u2019t \u201cknow\u201d jack feces.<\/p>\n Eventually, the dealership did honor the $27,162.79 offer, so they did end up doing the right thing in the end. But even if they hadn\u2019t, the law seems to be on Giacomelli\u2019s side. Canadian law has already encountered this issue, as a case in 2024 ruled<\/a> that companies (in this specific case, Air Canada<\/a>) are indeed responsible for what their AI agents tell customers.<\/p>\n\n
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Screenshot: YouTube\/CBC<\/p>\n\n