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The Airline Chatbot Lied and a Passenger Sued, Why You Shouldn’t Care About Your VC Being ‘Founder Friendly,’ and Will AI Slop Kill the Internet? [link blog]
URLs. Fresh hot URLs.
Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up [Ashley Belanger/Wired] -Air Canada’s chatbot gave a customer incorrect information about bereavement fare policies, and a court held the airline accountable. Unclear whether the chatbot was truly LLM powered — or by whom — but it’s a fun piece of case law now (at least in Canada) for GPT hallucinations.
The chatbot provided inaccurate information, encouraging Moffatt to book a flight immediately and then request a refund within 90 days. In reality, Air Canada’s policy explicitly stated that the airline will not provide refunds for bereavement travel after the flight is booked. Moffatt dutifully attempted to follow the chatbot’s advice and request a refund but was shocked that the request was rejected.
The best founders don’t care if an investor is “founder friendly” [Harry Glaser/Modelbit] — Repeat founder Harry Glaser wants a few things from his VCs but “founder friendly” ain’t one of them [disclosure: we’re investors in his ML deployment startup ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ].
Founders want to win so badly they put themselves in an all-in position. The traits an investor can demonstrate that make them irresistible to founders are: (1) A track record of winning, (2) a deeply-held, thoughtfully-justified belief that this business will be a winner, and (3) an unbroken history of high-integrity behavior when the chips are down.
An old-school Las Vegas bookie takes on a new era of sports betting [Danny Funt/WaPo] — Always love a ‘these guys are still doing it the way it used to be’ piece. South Point, one of the last family run hotels in Las Vegas, does 3/4 of its sports betting business IRL and still takes more action than any other institution in the state.
Asked about some national sportsbooks profiting as much as $30 for every $100 wagered while the South Point holds about $5 for every $100, Gaughan told a story from early in his career. Many riverboat passengers, he noticed, spent much of the trip sitting around glumly after going bust on slots. Gaughan lowered slot hold…
