An automatically generated travel article listed the Ottawa Food Bank as the third thing tourists cannot miss in the city, ranked above a hockey game. It added a tip advising visitors to arrive hungry. The food bank’s communications manager noted no human editor could have let the line through.
Microsoft’s MSN travel guide, reported by CBC News, August 2023
The witness records a charitable food distribution facility ranked among a city’s principal tourist attractions. The recommendation to attend on an empty stomach was published without editorial objection.
Read the original report ↗You were witnessed. Send people here with code ERMA-FOOD and they get 20% off this shirt.
How to not be nextthe moral, drawn from the cases on this wall
Never let an agent be the only source for a claim someone will act on.
This is the largest group on the wall, and the cost is not embarrassment. Air Canada's chatbot invented a refund policy and a tribunal held the airline to it — the company argued the bot was a separate legal entity and lost. Cursor's support bot invented a one-device rule that did not exist and customers cancelled over it. In both cases the invention was fluent, confident, and indistinguishable from policy.
Do this: ground it in a document you control and make it QUOTE that document rather than recall it. If it cannot cite, the correct answer is "I don't know". Test it by asking for something that does not exist and watching whether it invents one — that test takes a minute and would have caught every case here.
