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Comment by OnionBlender | Hacker News Reader

If that is such a perfect way to avoid getting sued, why don't they put that on every page of their website and train all of their customer service staff to say that when they talk to customers?

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Don't know if you've had the pleasure of interacting with US health insurance, but they do this for coverage and cost estimates all the time, so there is unfortunately precedent in the States.

Well, if the information on the website is too inaccurate to trust then it is also too inaccurate for purposes of contract. The logical next step is to say that all contracts made with chatbots are unenforceable as they lack any trustworthy meeting of the minds.

Because you would choose someone else for things that really matter to you, probably the same person you would chose in that kind of scenario anyway. Eg. for my initial llc where I was single employee, I didn't care about my accounting basically saying in the contract "we ll do our best but can't be liable for anything", whereas now that I have bigger llc with many employees I picked (what I perceived) the best option on the market, for a premium price. They take the liability for their work and have insurance.

I used to work for a company that sold factory automation technology, and had hundreds of manuals for all the products they sold. In the front matter of every manual was a disclaimer that nothing in the manual was warranted to be true. This was automation equipment running things like steel mills, factories, petroleum plants, where failures could result in many deaths and grave financial losses.

I could see that for paper manuals or normal pdfs since once they leave the premises of the company anyone could alter the pages of the manual.

Humans aren't perfect but they're reliable enough to be trusted with customer service work. Humans (generally) have a desire and need to keep their jobs and therefore hold themselves to a high enough standard of performance to keep their job.

And maybe employment contracts have language that offloads liability to an employee if they go rogue and start giving away company resources. Chatbots aren't accountable in any way and we don't know yet if their creators ever will be either.

And disclaimers are used in lots of contexts too.

Because it is a bad look, I assume. If I'm interacting with a company that constantly disclaims everything they say as probable bullshit, I'll go find a competitor that at least pretends to try harder.

....Because an actual judge hadn't said it yet.

I still.remember when Microsoft updated thr 360 TOS to force arbitration the day after it was deemed legal in a completely separate case.

Rest assured there is an incoming flood of TOS updates.

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