United Airlines Is Banning AI Bots from Booking Flights | Hacker News Reader

United Airlines Is Banning AI Bots from Booking Flights

wsj.com

9 pointsjaredwiener10 comments

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/united-airlines-is-banning-ai-bo...

How would United know that it's an AI agent? Would they just use click patterns to find it?

Without knowing anything about United’s systems, I’d hazard a guess agents prefer to call United APIs to make a booking rather than clicking and typing, and that these APIs are where the detection/restriction will be implemented.

Why do people keep asking this question? There are many ways to try. We know none are perfect, but it often needs to be done regardless. United's method is proprietary or otherwise guarded.

Official post: https://www.united.com/en/us/newsroom/announcements/cision-1...

this is what we actually need legislation applied to AI. companies can not be allowed to create efficiencies for themselves using AI, subjecting their customers to AI, and then ban the customer from using AI back.

Companies have built massive moats around profits by frustrating customers with poor customer service experience. Consumers using AI back at them threaten that. It's about time!

AI can get you cheaper tickets and breaks the price gouging the airline companies can do otherwise.

Simple things like monitoring prices daily, from different devices and comparing to competitors is trivial with AI.

This is not some heroic ‘yeah stop the evil ai united airlines!’ moment. In fact i suspect their efforts won’t even work that well. It’s also transparent why they’re using doing this. AI can making booking things much easier.

FTA: Agents will still have ways to show customers United’s flight options and prices, but they won’t be able to transact on its website.

Digging through the stated price, seat price, etc fee junk to present me with the best option, that'd be great. It's a question of whose. If you use Expedia, Kayak, or some other aggregator, they should apply the AI. United would give you a peephole into United only, with incentives to enshittify.

Because customer service is priority one… …hundred

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