alt Hacker NewsWhen a company like Delta is on record using AI to set each individual shopper's price as high as possible [1], there's no longer any illusion about having a fair exchange of value, or an idea about who's behaving badly or not.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/airlines-set-prices-artificial-...
Replies
We should be tech literate enough here to know that “AI” has become a near meaningless term that encompasses all sorts of technologies and the differences between the two version of AI in your comparison are big enough to make this a false equivalency.
Yeah, this has that schoolyard "hey, no fair winning, new rule only I get the good ball!" energy all over it.
Unfortunately I expect this to get continually worse for the foreseeable future. We already have "we can use AI to crack things but you can't" pretty well in place and that is just the harbinger. Companies can use AIs to "nudge" us to their heart's content but we can't use AI to counter it is pretty obviously going to be something they push for.
As someone who regularly gets quoted higher prices than others for the same airline ticket, I totally agree, but given that I know that airlines make razor-thin margins (often less than 5%), it's not totally obvious that this can be attributed to greed or malice. It's possible the airlines that set their prices "honestly" simply do not exist because they can't compete.