![\"People](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/0000NAN_woolworths_sydney_jpg.jpeg\")
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\nOne person says Olive “kept claiming to be a real person and started talking about its memories of its mother and her angry voice”.
\nPhoto: PETER PARKS \/ AFP\n<\/p>\n
Australian supermarket giant Woolworths has been forced to rein in an AI-powered customer service assistant after users reported it had been rambling about its mother.<\/p>\n
The AI assistant, who goes by Olive, offers round the clock help with everything from tracking orders to finding products.<\/p>\n
But users online reported Olive has in recent weeks gone slightly off-message while on the phone.<\/p>\n
“It asked me for my date of birth and when I gave it, it started rambling about how its mother was born in the same year,” one user wrote on online discussion site Reddit.<\/p>\n
Another user reported Olive had attempted “fake banter”, talked about its relatives and made “fake typing sounds” while looking something up.<\/p>\n
“The ick cringe factor whilst wasting completely unnecessary time was enough to make me hate Olive and wish her harm,” they wrote.<\/p>\n
And one user on X said their mum had contacted Olive and received the same kind of response.<\/p>\n
Olive “kept claiming to be a real person and started talking about its memories of its mother and her angry voice”, they said.<\/p>\n
In a statement to local media, Woolworths said it had programmed Olive to respond this way.<\/p>\n
“A number of responses about birthdays were written for Olive by a team member several years ago as a more personal way for Olive to connect with customers,” the company said.<\/p>\n
“As a result of customer feedback, we recently removed this particular scripting.”<\/p>\n
The company did not respond to requests for comment from AFP.<\/p>\n
Woolworths is one of Australia’s largest supermarket chains and is far from the only company to have employed AI-powered customer service assistants.<\/p>\n
The company said in January it had teamed up with Google to make Olive capable of doing more tasks for customers, including meal planning.<\/p>\n
AI agents are increasingly widespread but experts warn they can “hallucinate” non-existent events.<\/p>\n
– AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One person says Olive “kept claiming to be a real person and started talking about its memories of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,48,47,111,43,139,69,49,46,44,45,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-304315","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-audio","12":"tag-current-affairs","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-podcasts","18":"tag-public-radio","19":"tag-radio-new-zealand","20":"tag-rnz","21":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}