Erroneous Declined Transaction Notification by PayPal AI Assistant
June 19, 2024
On July 13th, 2024, a user reported an incident involving PayPal's generative AI chatbot. The chatbot allegedly incorrectly informed the user of a declined transaction that never occurred, causing confusion and prompting a call to customer service for clarification. This false alert suggests a flaw in the AI system's reliability. The incident created unnecessary labor for both the user and PayPal's human support, demonstrating the potential harm of deploying generative AI without thorough testing and error handling mechanisms.
- Alleged deployer
- paypal
- Alleged developer
- paypal
- Alleged harmed parties
- kiri-wagstaff, paypal-customer-service-representatives, paypal-customers
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/748
Data source
Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).
When citing the database as a whole, please use:
McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.
Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide
We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.