>Scott Hennessey, the owner of the New South Wales-based Australian Tours and Cruises, which operates Tasmania Tours, told the Australian Broadcasting Network (ABC) earlier this month that “our AI has messed up completely.”
To me this is the real takeaway for a lot of these uses of AI. You can put in practically zero effort and get a product. Then, when that product flops or even actively screws over your customers, just blame the AI!
No one is admitting it but AI is one of the easiest ways to shift blame. Companies have been doing this ever since they went digital. Ever heard of "a glitch in the system"? Well, now with AI you can have as many of those as you want, STILL never accept responsibility, and if you look to your left and right, everyone is doing it, and no one is paying the price.
It sounds like in this case there was some troll-fueled comeuppance.
> “We’re not a scam,” he continued. “We’re a married couple trying to do the right thing by people … We are legit, we are real people, we employ sales staff.”
> Australian Tours and Cruises told CNN Tuesday that “the online hate and damage to our business reputation has been absolutely soul-destroying.”
This might just be BS, but at face-value, this is a mom and pop shop that screwed up playing the SEO game and are getting raked over the internet coals.
Your broader point about blame-washing stands though.
I somewhat disagree, because at the end of the day he still has to take responsibility for the fuckup and that will matter in terms of dollars and reputation. I think this is also why a lot of roles just won't speed up that much, the bottleneck will be verification of outputs because it is still the human's job on the line.
An on the nose example would be, if your CEO asked you for a report, and you delivered fake data, do you think he would be satisfied with the excuse that AI got it wrong? Customers are going to feel the same way, AI or human, you (the company, the employee) messed up.
> if your CEO asked you for a report, and you delivered fake data, do you think he would be satisfied with the excuse that AI got it wrong?
He was likely the one who ordered the use of the AI. He won't fire you for mistakes in using it because it's a step on the path towards obsoleting your position altogether or replacing you with fungible minimum wage labor to babysit the AI. These mistakes are an investment in that process.
He doesn't have to worry about consequences in the short term because all the other companies are making the same mistakes and customers are accepting the slop labor because they have no choice.
In case anyone else is curious, I just entered the following in chatgpt: "Without searching the internet, do you know how to get to weldborough hot springs?"
> Yeah—roughly, from general local knowledge (no web searching, promise ). I’ll flag where my memory might be fuzzy.
> Weldborough Hot Springs are in northeast Tasmania, near Weldborough Pass on the Tasman Highway (A3) between Scottsdale and St Helens.
> It is however fraud on the part of the travel company to advertise something that doesn't exist
Just here to point out that from a legal perspective, fraud is deliberate deception.
In this case a tourist agency outsourced the creation of their marketing material to a company who used AI to produce it, with hallucinations. From the article it doesn't look like either of the two companies advertised the details knowing they're wrong, or had the intent to deceive.
Posting wrong details on a blog out of carelessness and without deliberate ill intention is not fraud more than using a wrong definition of fraud is fraud.
There has to be a clause for "willful disregard for the truth", no? Having your lying machine come up with plausible lies for you and publishing them without verification is no better than coming up with the lies yourself. What really protects them from fraud accusations is that these blog posts were just content marketing, they weren't making money off of them directly.
Seems like closer to fraud on behalf of the marketing company they outsourced to.
I doubt they commissioned articles on things that don't exist. If you use AI to perform a task that someone has asked you to do, it should be your responsibility to ensure that it has actually done that thing properly.
The consequences for wrong ai need to be a lot higher if we want to limit slop. Of course, there’s space for llms and their hallucinations to contribute meaningful things, but we need at least a screaming all caps disclaimer on content that looks like it could be human-generated but wasn’t (and absent that disclaimer or if the disclaimer was insufficiently prominent, false statements are treated as deliberate fraud)
How often do you have to update your page on "what's in a town" to "compete with the big boys"? Seems like you could just google what's in the town, or visit if you really want to make sure, rather than just asking your favourite LLM "What's there to do in Weldborough"?
The goal is to attract search traffic to your page, so that you can promote your product or your brand. AI is making this a lot cheaper than before because you don't even need to create the content, but it's also killing the overall amount of traffic to all websites.
If you actually take pride in your work, it's a double whammy of competing with AI slop and losing over half of your traffic to AI summaries.
has anyone checked to see if the AI included time co ordinates as well?
it might be that AI is missunderstanding our tempotral limitations, and if prompted correctly will provide a handy portal to when, there will in fact be hot springs at the location suggested.
>Scott Hennessey, the owner of the New South Wales-based Australian Tours and Cruises, which operates Tasmania Tours, told the Australian Broadcasting Network (ABC) earlier this month that “our AI has messed up completely.”
To me this is the real takeaway for a lot of these uses of AI. You can put in practically zero effort and get a product. Then, when that product flops or even actively screws over your customers, just blame the AI!
No one is admitting it but AI is one of the easiest ways to shift blame. Companies have been doing this ever since they went digital. Ever heard of "a glitch in the system"? Well, now with AI you can have as many of those as you want, STILL never accept responsibility, and if you look to your left and right, everyone is doing it, and no one is paying the price.
Yes, it's a big problem. I call it "agency laundering" and I first mentioned it in this article last year: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/08/is-ai...
Treating AI models as autonomous minds lets companies shift responsibility for tech failures.
It sounds like in this case there was some troll-fueled comeuppance.
> “We’re not a scam,” he continued. “We’re a married couple trying to do the right thing by people … We are legit, we are real people, we employ sales staff.”
> Australian Tours and Cruises told CNN Tuesday that “the online hate and damage to our business reputation has been absolutely soul-destroying.”
This might just be BS, but at face-value, this is a mom and pop shop that screwed up playing the SEO game and are getting raked over the internet coals.
Your broader point about blame-washing stands though.
There's a book "The Unaccountability Machine" that HN may be interested in. Takes a much broader approach across management systems.
I hope that this will result in people paying a premium for human curation and accountability, but I won't hold my breath.
I somewhat disagree, because at the end of the day he still has to take responsibility for the fuckup and that will matter in terms of dollars and reputation. I think this is also why a lot of roles just won't speed up that much, the bottleneck will be verification of outputs because it is still the human's job on the line.
An on the nose example would be, if your CEO asked you for a report, and you delivered fake data, do you think he would be satisfied with the excuse that AI got it wrong? Customers are going to feel the same way, AI or human, you (the company, the employee) messed up.
> dollars and reputation
You're not already numb to data breaches and token $0.72 class action payouts that require additional paperwork to claim?
In this article, these people did zero confirmatory diligence and got an afternoon side trip out of it. There are worse outcomes.
> if your CEO asked you for a report, and you delivered fake data, do you think he would be satisfied with the excuse that AI got it wrong?
He was likely the one who ordered the use of the AI. He won't fire you for mistakes in using it because it's a step on the path towards obsoleting your position altogether or replacing you with fungible minimum wage labor to babysit the AI. These mistakes are an investment in that process.
He doesn't have to worry about consequences in the short term because all the other companies are making the same mistakes and customers are accepting the slop labor because they have no choice.
In case anyone else is curious, I just entered the following in chatgpt: "Without searching the internet, do you know how to get to weldborough hot springs?"
> Yeah—roughly, from general local knowledge (no web searching, promise ). I’ll flag where my memory might be fuzzy.
> Weldborough Hot Springs are in northeast Tasmania, near Weldborough Pass on the Tasman Highway (A3) between Scottsdale and St Helens.
Screenshot with more: https://postimg.cc/14TqgfN4
“our AI has messed up completely.”
No, it worked as designed. Generative AI simply creates content of the type that you specify, but has no concept of truth or facts.
New variant on "I followed my satnav blindly and now I'm stuck in the river", except less reliable.
It is however fraud on the part of the travel company to advertise something that doesn't exist. Another form of externalized cost of AI.
> It is however fraud on the part of the travel company to advertise something that doesn't exist
Just here to point out that from a legal perspective, fraud is deliberate deception.
In this case a tourist agency outsourced the creation of their marketing material to a company who used AI to produce it, with hallucinations. From the article it doesn't look like either of the two companies advertised the details knowing they're wrong, or had the intent to deceive.
Posting wrong details on a blog out of carelessness and without deliberate ill intention is not fraud more than using a wrong definition of fraud is fraud.
The standard is to add disclaimers like "Al responses may include mistakes." The chatbot they used to generate that text would have mentioned that.
Everybody knows AI makes stuff up. It's common knowledge.
To omit that disclaimer, the author needs to take responsibility for fact checking anything they post.
Skipping that step, or leaving out the disclaimer, is not carelessness, it is willful misrepresentation.
There has to be a clause for "willful disregard for the truth", no? Having your lying machine come up with plausible lies for you and publishing them without verification is no better than coming up with the lies yourself. What really protects them from fraud accusations is that these blog posts were just content marketing, they weren't making money off of them directly.
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Seems like closer to fraud on behalf of the marketing company they outsourced to.
I doubt they commissioned articles on things that don't exist. If you use AI to perform a task that someone has asked you to do, it should be your responsibility to ensure that it has actually done that thing properly.
The consequences for wrong ai need to be a lot higher if we want to limit slop. Of course, there’s space for llms and their hallucinations to contribute meaningful things, but we need at least a screaming all caps disclaimer on content that looks like it could be human-generated but wasn’t (and absent that disclaimer or if the disclaimer was insufficiently prominent, false statements are treated as deliberate fraud)
How often do you have to update your page on "what's in a town" to "compete with the big boys"? Seems like you could just google what's in the town, or visit if you really want to make sure, rather than just asking your favourite LLM "What's there to do in Weldborough"?
> Seems like you could just google what's in the town
You'll still get an AI generate answer at the top, followed by 3 AI generated sponsored blog scams, etc.
You probably need to update every now and the because of SEO and such.
The goal is to attract search traffic to your page, so that you can promote your product or your brand. AI is making this a lot cheaper than before because you don't even need to create the content, but it's also killing the overall amount of traffic to all websites.
If you actually take pride in your work, it's a double whammy of competing with AI slop and losing over half of your traffic to AI summaries.
Useful independent websites are so cooked.
has anyone checked to see if the AI included time co ordinates as well? it might be that AI is missunderstanding our tempotral limitations, and if prompted correctly will provide a handy portal to when, there will in fact be hot springs at the location suggested.
It seems very likely if you go back in time far enough the region was very hot. Something around 4.5 billion years should do it.
Weldborough seems to have done well out of it either way.
[dead]
Australia has drop bears anyhow. Do they exist?
Seems par for course.