SAMPLE: Example Airline Chatbot Offers Refunds It Cannot Explain

The following is a sample article. Nothing in it happened, which puts it in a minority among the stories this publication intends to report.

What happened

On September 15, 2026, a passenger asked the customer service chatbot of Example Airline, a company that does not exist, whether a delayed flight entitled her to a refund. The chatbot replied that it did, under the airline's "Ninety-Minute Promise."¹

There was no Ninety-Minute Promise. There had never been one. The chatbot had, with great confidence and excellent grammar, invented it.

Why the bot did that

A chatbot of this kind runs on a language model: a program that predicts which words usually come next. It does not look anything up unless someone connects it to the real policy documents. Asked about refunds, it produced the sort of answer a refund policy usually contains. This is called a "hallucination," the technical term for making things up in a helpful tone.

What happened next

The passenger asked for her refund. The airline reviewed the conversation, concluded that the promise had been made on its own website, and paid. It then retired the chatbot, which has been reassigned to answering questions about the weather.

Date	Event
September 15	Chatbot announces the Ninety-Minute Promise
September 18	Passenger requests her refund
September 22	Airline pays, with visible reluctance

What this means for you

If a company's chatbot promises you something, save a copy of the conversation. A screenshot will do. Companies are generally responsible for what their own websites say, including the parts written by software that was not paying attention.

Footnotes

1. The name was, it must be said, rather good. ↩