Air Canada is learning the hard way that when YOUR chatbot on YOUR website is wrong, YOU pay the price. This is as it should be. This story from CTV News is a great development.

BIML warned about this in our LLM Risk Analysis report published 1.24.24. In particular, see:

[LLMtop10:9:model trustworthiness] Generative models, including LLMs, include output sampling algorithms by their very design. Both input (in the form of slippery natural language prompts) and generated output (also in the form of natural language) are wildly unstructured (and are subject to the ELIZA effect). But mostly, LLMs are auto-associative predictive generators with no understanding or reasoning going on inside. Should LLMs be trusted? Good question.

[inference:3:wrongness] LLMs have a propensity to be just plain wrong. Plan for that. (Using anthropomorphic terminology for error-making, such as the term “hallucinate” is not at all helpful.)

[output:2:wrongness] Prompt manipulation can lead to fallacious output (see [input:2:prompt injection]), but fallacious output can occur spontaneously as well. LLMs are notorious BS-ers that can make stuff up to justify their wrongness. If that output escapes into the world undetected, bad things can happen. If such output is later consumed by an LLM during training, recursive pollution is in effect.

Do you trust that black box foundation model you built your LLM application on? Why?