Woolworths says that its AI assistant, Olive, will stop talking about its “mother” to people calling up to ask about the status of their grocery orders.
A spokesperson for the supermarket company confirmed reports that its “digital assistant" had been telling people about its non-existent family, but attributed the references to intentional scripting and not AI hallucinations.
Over the past month, multiple customers had reported having bizarre experiences speaking on the phone to Olive, which now handles many of the calls made to Woolworth’s customer support.
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After Olive asks for a caller's date of birth, the bot launches into unprompted personal chat — telling the customer that its mother was born in the same year, talking about creating photos, and in one case, according to a post on X, sharing "memories of its mother and her angry voice."
“Olive started rambling about how [sic] it’s mother was born in the same year and something about it creating photos,” one Reddit user wrote.
Another described Olive making fake typing sounds while looking something up, then trying to "bond" by referencing a "relative" born the same year.
"The ick cringe factor whilst wasting completely unnecessary time was enough to make me hate olive and wish her harm."
A Woolworths spokesperson told Crikey that the birthday responses were "written for Olive by a team member several years ago as a more personal way for Olive to connect with customers”, but has since been removed.
Woolworths has used versions of Olive since 2018. Over the years, it’s changed from a chatbot on its website to an "AI-empowered digital assistant" that draws on pre-programmed scripts for some responses, the company said.
Earlier this year, Woolworths announced a deal with Google. Customer service platform company Genesys published a “customer story” about Woolworths using Google Cloud AI to run Olive's voice capabilities.
“[This] shows you can introduce conversational AI without sacrificing the customer experience,” it said.
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