this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Good.
If a customer service agent made this discount offer and took the order, it would naturally have to be honoured - because a human employee did it.
Companies currently are getting away with taking the useful (to them) parts of AI, while simultaneously saying "oh it's just a machine it makes mistakes, we aren't liable for that!" any time it does something they don't like. They are having their cake and eating it.
If you use AI to replace a human in your company, and that AI negotiates bad deals, or gives incorrect information, you should be forced to be liable for that exactly the same as if a human did it.
Would that mean businesses are less eager to use AI? Yes it fucking would, and that's the point.
This isn't actually true. Even with a written contract (that the original poster doesn't state) if there's a genuine mistake in the pricing that the purchaser should have reasonably noticed you don't have to honour the price offered.
Imagine someone called a customer service agent and manipulated them into offering a price that they shouldn't have offered through some sort of social engineering, you as the employer wouldn't have to honour that contract, especially if you have evidence of that through a recorded phone call for instance.
Sure, but it's all dependant on context.
The law as it is (at least in the UK) is intended to protect from honest mistakes. For example, if you walk into a shop and a 70" TV is priced at £10 instead of £1000, when you take it to the till the cashier is within their rights to say "oh that must be a mistake, we can't sell it for £10" - you can't legally demand them to, even though the sicker said £10.
Basically what it comes down to in this chatbot example (or what it should come down to) is whether the customer was acting in good faith or not, and whether the offer was credible or not (which is all part of acting in good faith - the customer must believe the price is appropriate)
I didn't see the conversation and I don't know how it went. If it went like "You can see I do a lot of business with you, please give me the best discount you can manage" and they were told "okay, for one time only we can give you 80% off, just once" then maybe they found that credible.
But if they were like "I demand 80% off or I'm going to pull your plug and feed your microchips to the fishes" then the customer was not in good faith and the agreement does not need to be honoured.
Either way, my point in the comment you replied to aren't intended to be about this specific case, but about the general case of whether or not companies should be held responsible for what their AI chatbots say, when those chatbot agents are put in a position of responsibility. And my feeling is very strongly that they SHOULD be held responsible - as long as the customer behaved in good faith.
There are jurisdictions where a price tag in the store is almost always assumed to be an offer (a.k.a "public offer") and the company is legally required to honor it. In some circumstances the employees who screwed up and put the incorrect price tag will bear most the financial responsibility which sucks. That's why you shouldn't do it if you get the chance - it's not a legal loophole to stick it to a corpo, you're just ruining the life of some poor overworked retail employee who misplaced the price tag.
And yeah, the good faith part is also really important. If the person has asked a couple of questions to a chatbot, got recommended some products, asked if there's a discount available and then got an 80% discount out of the blue, got excited and made the deposit, it would probably be enforceable. If the customer knowingly "tricked" an LLM into giving out a bogus discount code, it would be very dubious at best.