The Polite Catastrophe

Picture this: Someone just gave a pattern-matching teenager the company credit card.

What could possibly go wrong?

A Chevrolet dealership in California found out the hard way.

Their chatbot went viral in 2024. Not for the right reasons.

Customers started asking: "Can I have a car for $1?"

The bot said yes.

Screenshots spread everywhere. (You can imagine how that went.)

Here's the thing...

The bot learned from thousands of customer service examples. "Yes" makes customers happy. Agreement gets good ratings.

Nobody's training data included "Don't sell cars for a dollar."

It's like teaching someone to always say please and thank you... then being shocked when they politely give away your house.

Air Canada discovered this costs real money.

Their chatbot invented a bereavement fare. 

Why? 

Because it had seen sympathy in customer service. It knew discounts exist.

It combined the patterns.

Created something that sounded real.

A customer saved the screenshot. Took them to court.

The judge ordered Air Canada to pay $650.

The bot's fiction became fact.

Your AI combines patterns it's seen:

Customer service + discounts = made-up policies.Helpful + sales = impossible promises.

It can't check if these combinations are real.

It just knows they sound right.

But here's where it gets interesting...

Pattern matching. Zero fact-checking.

Unless you do pattern match fact-checking…