A business owner in the UK told of a case where a user of his website was able to convince an AI chatbot to give him an 80% discount and scored £8,000 worth of goods (about UAH 470,000).
A business owner in the UK told of a case where a user of his website was able to convince an AI chatbot to give him an 80% discount and scored £8,000 worth of goods (about UAH 470,000).
The businessman reported this in a post on the subreddit r/LegalAdviceUK, where he asked for legal advice.
«The website has a chatbot that helps customers navigate the site and can be used to register orders/collect customer contact information. One customer interacted with it and managed to convince the chatbot to give him a 25% discount, and then negotiated with the chatbot for a discount of up to 80%,» the man said.
The businessman said that the unexpected discount would have cost him thousands of pounds, so he wrote to the customer to cancel his order. In response, the customer said that he would sue if he did not receive his order.
The owner of an online store asked Reddit users if he could ignore the buyer’s threats. Some users sided with the buyer and advised hiring humans instead of AI. Some noted that the buyer would not be able to win in court. The seller later said that he had refunded his money.
«A chatbot shouldn’t make financial decisions. It should answer customer questions from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. when I’m not around. It worked well for over 6 months, and then this guy spent an hour talking to it, got it to show how good it was at math and percentages, turned the conversation to percentage discounts on a theoretical order, and then pretended to be impressed,» the store owner said.
According to him, the AI generated a fake promo code with a 25% discount, and later increased the discount to 80%, trying to impress the buyer. When the promo code did not work in the corresponding window, the user indicated it in the comments to the order with a request to provide him with the corresponding discount.
