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.

“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.

Another user reported Olive had attempted “fake banter”, talked about its relatives and made “fake typing sounds” while looking something up.

“The ick cringe factor whilst wasting completely unnecessary time was enough to make me hate Olive and wish her harm,” they wrote.

Olive “kept claiming to be a real person and started talking about its memories of its mother and her angry voice”, they said.

In a statement to local media, Woolworths said it had programmed Olive to respond this way.