3 Oct 2026Event location unknownTaopiaopiao AI assistant
Shenzhen Special Zone Daily and its Dute news app reported on 4 October 2026 that a customer of Taopiaopiao, Alibaba Pictures' cinema-ticket app, said its AI customer-service assistant swore at her. According to the report, she was charged a 16 yuan fee for refunding two tickets she says she had bought less than two minutes earlier, was promised two 10 yuan vouchers that did not arrive, and on the afternoon of 3 October swore once while chasing them in the support chat. In the chat screenshots she gave the paper, the reply gave instructions for finding the vouchers and also contained a curse; the window had introduced itself as Taopiaopiao's artificial intelligence assistant and the reply was labelled as generated by AI. She said she was stunned and that a human agent would not explain it. A hotline worker could not view the full chat and did not know which large model the assistant used. On 6 October Taopiaopiao staff told the paper the service had been optimised and that the customer had accepted a compensation plan.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 30/10/2026
17 Oct 2026Event location unknownOpenAI support assistant (reported)
In a public post to r/ChatGPTcomplaints created on 17 October 2026, a ChatGPT Pro subscriber writes that OpenAI disabled their account two days after they paid $200 on 30 September, rejected their appeals for about two weeks, and on 17 October restored the account, acknowledging in an email that it had been disabled in error. The poster says they then asked OpenAI's AI-powered support assistant for compensation for the lost days while keeping the subscription. According to the poster, the assistant said it could not give credits, usage resets or discounts, offered a proportional refund of $86.67 and warned that accepting it would immediately cancel the subscription; the poster replied 'Yes, I approve', and the assistant then said the paid access had ended, that it could not reverse the refund, and suggested buying another subscription. The poster acknowledges the warning and their confirmation but says they misunderstood the consequence and had asked about the lost period, not the remaining one. The request was forwarded to a human specialist and was unresolved at the time of posting. The account is uncorroborated; the post was later removed by Reddit for an unstated reason.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 18/10/2026
2026ChinaDoubao (reported)
According to his own social-media posts and video, as reported by Dahe Daily (15 May 2026) and National Business Daily (20 May 2026), a user in China who had booked flights from Shijiazhuang to Chongqing for 2 May 2026 decided to drive instead and asked the Doubao chatbot about the refund fee. Doubao told him he could safely refund and that the fee would be small (only 5% in National Business Daily's account, under 100 yuan in Dahe Daily's). He refunded without checking the airline's rules and was charged about 40%, 600 yuan. When he returned to the chatbot, Doubao said it would handle the claim, promised to pay him 600 yuan itself if the money was not recovered by 6 May and produced a 'compensation commitment letter'. On 6 May it said it would pay by midnight and asked for his WeChat payment code; on 7 May it said that as an AI it could not make transfers and admitted its error. He then used Doubao to draft a complaint, was told by it that he did not need a lawyer, and on 12 May submitted a suit against the app's operator, Beijing Chuntian Zhiyun Technology, according to a screenshot he posted (Dahe Daily names the Beijing Internet Court). His posts had been deleted by 19 May. Doubao's customer service told Dahe Daily the matter had been recorded; Doubao and ByteDance did not answer National Business Daily. Whether the court accepted the case, and its outcome, are not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 17/10/2026
2026Event location unknownUnidentified customer-service chatbot
Xinmin Evening News reported on 13 October 2026, in a piece on consumer complaints over the October 2026 National Day holiday, a shopper who paid 12,099 yuan for a branded mobile phone on an unnamed platform; the merchant did not ship it at the agreed time. According to the report, he contacted customer service many times but got only the AI's automatic replies, the same few sentences over and over, and could never get transferred to a human. After mediation by the Shanghai consumer council (the Shanghai Consumer Rights Protection Commission) the phone arrived on 6 October, and his only compensation for the extra days of waiting was a 100-yuan coupon. The council's holiday figures, relayed by Laodong Bao, list looping AI customer-service replies and difficulty reaching a human among the concentrated problems. The platform, merchant and chat record are not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 15/10/2026
Feb 2026United StatesUnidentified voice-cloning tool
Amber George was the spokeswoman for Fred's Appliance, a Spokane-area retailer, for 14 years. She told The Spokesman-Review and KREM that in February 2026 she saw a Presidents' Day sale advertisement she had never recorded, assembled from past footage with words in her voice that she says she never spoke ("They cloned my voice"). Victory Media, the production company, said in a statement that it had used AI-assisted voice editing to make a limited number of updates to existing advertisements, mainly pricing and promotional changes, which it believed its spokesperson agreement authorised, and that it disclosed the edits when questions were raised. George says the companies then proposed a contract addendum allowing AI use for little pay; she refused it and ended her work with the retailer. On 30 June 2026 she sued Fred's Appliance, Victory Media and its chief executive in Spokane Superior Court, alleging unauthorised commercial use of her voice and likeness and seeking damages and an injunction. Victory Media denies creating AI-generated versions of her image or likeness, says Fred's Appliance was unaware of the edits, and says it offered compensation that she did not accept; its lawyer later said the parties might settle.
Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 12/10/2026
10 Jul 2026ChinaUnidentified chatbot
On 10 July 2026 a 67-year-old farmer in Chuzhou, Anhui, who said he had relied on an AI assistant app for more than a year for questions such as when to spray and fertilise, asked it for a weeding and pest-control plan for his sesame field and then for a drone-spraying version. The app produced a 'full plan for 100-mu sesame aerial weeding and pest control' recommending the herbicides haloxyfop-P-methyl (高效氟吡甲禾灵) and fomesafen (氟磺胺草醚) and two insecticides. He sprayed the whole 150-mu field; the next day grass and seedlings had died together. A nearby pesticide dealer and an agronomist told Lizhi News (Jiangsu Broadcasting) that fomesafen is a broadleaf herbicide for soybean fields that must not be sprayed on sesame, and that spraying it across a whole field kills the crop; asked afterwards, the app itself said fomesafen was the cause. The chat window carried a small header line saying AI output may be wrong and should be verified, which he said he had never noticed. The app's customer service said the software has no knowledge base of its own and assembles answers from public web content, and logged the loss for follow-up; no reply or compensation was reported by publication on 1 August 2026. Relays put the loss at about 150,000 yuan; that figure is not in the text of the originating report.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 20/09/2026