Blaming the Algorithm: A Man Sued the Doubao Chatbot Over the Burial Date It Chose

When his mother died suddenly on April 17, Mr Shi — a Jiangsu native from Shuyang living in Jiashan county, Zhejiang — faced the decision every Chinese family makes within hours of a death: choosing the day to bury her. A traditional calculation suggested April 20, but Shi felt the fourth day after death, an even number, did not fit his home region's customs. So he turned to the assistant he used every day: Doubao, ByteDance's AI chatbot, according to a report by Haibo News that aired on September 15. The chatbot recommended April 19, complete with a burial window between seven and nine in the morning. Later, when Shi asked it to confirm, it replied that April 19 was not an auspicious day at all. By then the relatives had all been notified and the date could not be moved. The burial went ahead.

Afterwards, a family member was seriously injured in a car accident, and the family concluded that the wrongly chosen date had disrupted the funeral's fengshui. Shi complained to the company and got no response, the report said. His response was to sue — and to have the AI draft his own lawsuit. The complaint asks only for a formal apology, and the case has now been heard at Jiashan County People's Court.

For an outsider, the case is a window into how smartphones now mediate one of China's oldest habits: consulting the almanac. Auspicious dates — huangdao jiri, "yellow-road lucky days" — govern weddings, funerals, house moves and shop openings, traditionally chosen by a hired master or a printed almanac, more recently by apps. The change is that a conversational chatbot now sits where the almanac did, answering with the same calm confidence whether it is drafting a work email or arranging a funeral.

The public verdict has been less about the custom than about the machine. The question drew more than a million "heat" points on Zhihu, where commenters largely treated the lawsuit as legally doomed but culturally telling: no court is likely to find that a chatbot's date is a service that can be negligent, and the crash was a coincidence of the kind grieving families reach for. One Weibo user condensed the mood into a jab at the technology itself, calling Doubao an "Artificial Idiot" — a pun the post's spread suggests many shared. Others noted the irony that Shi trusted the chatbot over the local fortune-teller, then punished it for behaving like one.

What the case leaves open is the question beneath the laughter. Millions of people now put ordinary, consequential decisions to chatbots that answer without hedging, and the law has not said what happens when the answer is wrong. Shi asked for no damages — only for the company to say sorry. The court has not yet ruled.