(NEXSTAR) – A supermarket chain in Australia has dialed back its AI assistant after callers say it started “rambling” about its mother and even insisted it was a real human being. Customers say they began encountering issues with "Olive," the AI chatbot for Australia’s Woolworths supermarket chain, over the last month. “My mum said she called [W]oolworths and the [W]oolworths AI ‘Olive’ answered and kept claiming to be a real person and started talking about its memories of its mother and her angry voice,” one X user claimed. Another person said they were prompted to give Olive their birth date to confirm their account information, only for Olive to start “rambling about how [its] mother was born in the same year and something about it creating photos.” “Anyway, I called back just to see if it would do it again and sure enough — it did,” the customer wrote on Reddit, claiming that Olive then began talking about her uncle's birth year and joking that he was “one of the first-ever fuel cells.” A spokesperson for Woolworths told the Australian Financial Review that the birthday-themed responses were not created by Olive, but rather a Woolworth’s employee who included the remarks for the AI assistant to draw upon. “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 spokesman told the outlet. “As a result of customer feedback, we recently removed this particular scripting.” A representative for Woolworths was not immediately available to comment on Olive’s remarks, nor whether the allegations of Olive insisting on being a “real person” could be the result of similar programmed responses or jokes. In any case, some users who interacted with Olive seemed more annoyed by the chatbot’s penchant for going on little tangents, rather than answering their questions in a more timely manner. “I’ve never been more unimpressed. Do they think anyone calling up about delivery issues is going to be in the mood for this bulls---?” one Reddit user said. “I hate when the overly fake friendly call centre people start asking me about my weekend and what I've been up to. [I]'m not taking that from a robot!” another commented. Woolworths, which introduced Olive in 2018, said feedback about their AI chatbot had been “very positive” over the last several years, the BBC reported. But in January 2026, the company partnered with Google to help program Olive for more intricate tasks, according to the outlet. Last week, The Conversation also reported that Olive’s pricing information appeared to be somewhat unreliable. Uri Gal, a professor of business administration systems at the University of Sydney, theorized that Olive’s language learning model (LLM) may be sourcing information from “learned patterns rather than real-time data.” “If something seems unclear, inconsistent or too good to be true, it is worth double-checking,” Gal advised of Olive's pricing information.