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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

Yea, it’s certainly a reasonable argument if the wrong information comes from the company itself.

That's an excellent point. That court decided that an AI agent was an agent in the legal sense. "Agent" is a legal concept - someone acting for someone else.[1] It's what allows employees to act for a company. Otherwise nobody could do anything without signoff from the top. There are limits to agency, but it's a rule of reason thing - you can assume a store clerk has the authority to sell you stuff, and someone whose job is to answer questions has the authority to answer questions. The company has responsibility for the agent's actions within the scope of their authority.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_agency

[2] https://www.upcounsel.com/lectl-what-the-california-civil-co...

The situation here is slightly different, though. Meta's AI in their various products is explicitly marketed as an LLM chatbot, not as a customer support channel.

Whether they've been diligent enough in making that distinction (and whether that's even possible) will very likely be determined in court at some point.

Yeah, headline is overly broad by just saying 'AI'. From just the headline itself, it'd be easy to write this off as "duh, this guy's a fool", but the AI in question here is from Meta, itself. And, not only is it from Meta, but it's the AI they've put in charge of support.

> And, not only is it from Meta, but it's the AI they've put in charge of support.

Does it say that in the article or somewhere else? I didn’t see that in the article.

You can see it in the screenshots.

It says “Meta AI”, but I don’t see an indicator that it’s labeled as providing support. On my device, it doesn’t say so, and is labeled as possibly “inaccurate or inappropriate “. (It still provides a bogus phone number.)

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