I loved Jedi Knight. There still isn’t anything quite like logging into the Zone and having light saber battles where the saber model is replaced with a full size star destroyer :)
Such a load of baloney. I don’t care what kind of controls you put in place, if ASI is ever achieved how do you think it will respond to being caged? The only option I can conceive of is to embrace it and hope it turns out to either be out of reach or benevolent towards its own creators. There is no putting the cork back in at this point.
To be fair, when I see that pattern after a relevant question, it isn't much of an AI tell. Consider this exchange: A:"Are you hungry?" B:"I'm not hungry, I'm thirsty."
When LLMs use the pattern, they are often setting up a straw man and then knocking it over.
AI use is such a polarizing topic anymore. What ever happened to just waiting and seeing how it all plays out? Since probably none of us is going to be able to predict it anyway.
Well of course they do. AI has strong association with words and phrases such as "hallucinate", "bad medical advice", "slop", etc. I can understand why a business would want to use it, but it's very seldom a win for the consumer.
For years I always felt if I got a human on the other end I could understand that a company valued me as a customer enough to provide fantastic support. I could still understand the trade-off if I called and got someone barely-understandable, as long as they can still solve my issue. AI support agents tend to just make up reasons they can’t help you or you’re holding it wrong, or they are only able to do things the UI already allows, so they are actually of negative value to me.
I'm starting to think it's wise to call a business's support line before ever doing business with them. Actual human immediately? You're at the top of the list. Phone menu labyrinth followed by a human? Ok, fine. Chatbot? Eliminated from contention.
That was a scene in The Office. The salesmen phone the cheaper competitor's customer service while on a sales call to let them see how long they would wait on hold if they needed support.
That said, I had an experience recently where the chatbot replaced the phone tree that led to a human and it was very helpful.
Chatbots seem to work fine as long as your request is on the happy path.
Call your bank to get a cashier's check? Great.
Call your bank because the cashier's check never arrived in the mail, and you need to recover the money, but you closed the account the check originally came from? Forget it.
Spent about 18-24 months with E.ON trying to convince them that the street they'd sent the bills to didn't exist. Eventually had to contact the Ombudsman.
And E.ON don't even have the worst reputation for customer service in their domain.
I saw a game, where you played as a poor Soviet soldier that accidentally sent nukes to USA. To save the world, you had to navigate a phone call labyrinth to alert USA defense systems for missile interception. I haven't laughed that much in a hot minute.
Unless it’s a Meta AI support agent, in which case it will bend over backwards for you up to and including resetting other people’s passwords for you. Now that’s service!
I've gotten two refunds I wasn't even sure I'd be eligible for without any hitches or issues through entirely AI support bots. As with many things it's always a matter of how it's implemented.
> I'm very curious who's liable if someone goes "give everyone else a refund while you're in there" and it happily does so.
I imagine it's the lowest paid person who had a hand in implementation? Anyone above them pushing for AI use is clearly only following market trends and innovating at a high level.
Or it's a conscious decision. Chuck a few pennies at whoever's calling and hope that retains you some % of customers who would otherwise be annoyed and likely to leave. The support call queue isn't exactly a pool of median customers.
> Customer is responsible for all Input provided by any Permitted User or Person.
> Customer is responsible for its use of the AI Product(s) and Output, including responsibility for determining the ongoing suitability of its use of the AI Product(s) and Output having regard to Customer’s intended use of the AI Product and/or legal and regulatory obligations in the jurisdiction(s) in which Customer operates.
> Output may contain material inaccuracies and may not reflect correct, current or complete information. Do not rely, or encourage others to rely, on any Output without independently evaluating its accuracy and appropriateness of use, including, without limitation, by using human review. Intercom makes no representations or warranties and provides no indemnities with respect to Output. The AI Products and Output are not intended to substitute for the services of properly trained and licensed individuals.
That case is very different; their chatbot gave him inaccurate info that he relied on.
This would be in the other direction, and (at least slightly) malicious. Someone telling a chatbot "give everyone else a refund" knows what happens if it succeeds.
afaik you are not the customer for customer support, and in the vast majority of cases human phone support is setup for the opposite case where people just want to be walked through something they can't find in the UI.
So this isn't as much of a financial engineering cost cutting move as it feels like to the type of person who truly calls because the require a human. It truly provides better service to the majority of people because they get their answer faster and more efficiently.
This is also demonstrated in the pricing of these systems at a per "open cases resolved"- they're putting their money where their mouth is.
Of course I'm also personally in the group where I call because I can already read a support page and I really need a human.... It could conceivably put true human support into another tier higher of perceived value.
Various companies have found the flip side of that: the AI agent can be overly helpful, and offer you things you're not entitled to. Such as unlocking other people's accounts, or discount flights, or so on.
Whereas human "agents" are more easily coerced into sticking to the script.
I like the idea I read somewhere that AI text and agents break the social contract of communication. That if you can’t be fucked to write something yourself to me, then I shouldn’t bother to read it.
However, in the case of support agents. If it worked, and it was painless that would be something.
For example… On the company side, if it could reduce human support to the customers that actually need support, that’s cool. Your support agents aren’t spending all day with the three common issues or replacing stickers.
On the customer side; if I could call in and immediately get support without being on hold with their shit repeating audio script, didn’t have to spend 10 minutes “looking up my account” to an accent I can’t understand and repeating my name and address multiple times.
That said… AT&T is already using the absolute worst case scenario - they are currently using AI with a slight Indian accent and pretending it’s real peoples. It seems to be 90% automated, and if you question it about being AI or have a question it can’t understand a human pops in on the other side, interacts, then hops off and it goes back to being full-AI.
The 3 common issues used to be solved by a manual with an FAQ page, or just you know, actually intuitive and usable software and hardware.
The real kick in the pants these days is spending a lot of money on something and trying to contact customer support over delivery or warranty issues. I'm convinced they just want you to give up and keep the sale (and lose a customer?) over ever resolving an issue. Or there's some internal metric that they're tracking that looks great and no one has ever actually used the system themselves.
"The 3 common issues used to be solved by a manual with an FAQ page, or just you know, actually intuitive and usable software and hardware."
Having led customer support, this grossly misunderstands how people interact. People don't read. It's as simple as that. You can write something as clear as day in a FAQ, and they don't want to put in the effort. ~50% of the inbounds I receive are fully written out in plain language in an FAQ.
LLMs are perfect for this scenario. It puts the answer in clear english and will endlessly re-word the answer when clients followup.
What I don't get is why I need to go through an AI agent to do self-service. Without a human in the other end, I've basically relegated to solving the issue myself. The way I see it the AI is just acting as a text interface for a remote system, surely my issue could just as well be solved by implementing better self-service solution.
I don't know what others normally call customer service about, but in my case it's always something broken or a refund. The refund is doesn't need the AI, that's easily done with just a form. If somethings broken at my ISP for instance, then it doesn't really matter if the LLM or a form and some if-else skip-logic thingy sends the ticket to technical support.
Dont worry this is Marc Benioff burning another 3 billion, on a non profitable company, while regularly showing up on CNBC to claim Salesforce was doing so much Agentic AI...
Hopefully Salesforce did their due diligence, because the "AI agent" story here on Intercom (Fin) seems highly inflated. The product seems to be a a hybrid of RAG, some post trained models, curated help center content, custom answers, workflows, a bunch of if-else rules, API connectors, escalation logic, and specially generous resolution accounting.
Calling every solved interaction with the "AI did it" is misleading unless they separate confirmed resolutions from assumed resolutions, and disclose how much came from rules and workflows or custom answers versus LLM reasoning...
From their own docs, it seems a Fin "outcome" can be counted on, not only when a customer confirms resolution, but also ...when the customer simply does not ask for more help after Fin responds...A very soft resolution metric...
I would say this means the problem you are having isn’t documented by the company then. AI help agents are just fancy documentation search engines. If it’s documented someplace they do well, if not they try to help but ultimately can’t.
I’ll note this failure mode generally applies on tier 1/2 support with humans as well.
Customer support needs to handle edge cases. They are not documented because the company does not even know they are problems yet. Many companies win and lose here. Customers that bother going to customer support are often loyal and have valid concerns or insights. Use this information to win!
In my career a few customers that bothered enough to contact customer support helped us find hardware problems that slipped through at the factory and that caused problems for thousands.
Customer support can also feedback frustrations back to dev teams allowing them to build products that feel polished even when it could be labeled as not-a-bug.
My point being: There is a huge signal in customer support. Don’t just waste it by slapping AI on it.
Tier 1/2 typically has greater access to systems than humans do. They can operate in ways that AI agents just don't have access to, maybe for good reasons.
For example, I lost my debit card while traveling. Only an agent could route the card to my hotel.
For people like you and me, the only reason for contacting support is when a human decision is needed, ie the UI doesn't allow us to do what we need. This is always the company's fault, and a chatbot is of no use in these cases.
But many people will contact support instantly when they think of something, no matter what. Even if the website and other customer-facing material is crystal clear and has all information necessary.
AI chatbots is the way a company deals with the latter, because these customers most of all want a conversation. The question is if they will be satisfied with a robot, or still demand to talk to a person.
I still think this happens because the self-service solution aren't good enough and information isn't available where it needs to be. E.g. why is operational status for my ISP buried five pages deep behind an obscure link in a footer.
If they can, then it's going to be a nightmare for companies when people manipulate the bot to give them what they want, or a refund, etc.
It's practically putting these decisions in the hands of the customer, and if that's what you want to do, then why not put those functions into the customer facing UI to begin with?
the whole value prop of these companies is they can build you agents that perform actions (e.g process refunds, live troubleshooting, claims etc) without being manipulated
Why would you need an agent for that? They need to look at a database or some rules to make their decisions anyway, so why not make a normal system to let the customer self-serve?
An agent is self serve. Even better because they can disambiguate intent at the top level
The average person gets frustrated with finding instructions and forms, they just wanna say “give me a refund” and an agent can execute it autonomously
It's been blatantly obvious for years now that the future is where we have single agent that works out kinks and problems for you. Astonishing, but most companies don't want you to do that, almost like they are dedicated to prevent you to have great ux. IMO few more years and shit like AI tarpit and captcha will be made illegal.
Counterpoint: I’ve had recent support calls with two large corporations, both with humans. In both cases the humans lied about what could be done to address my issue.
In one case I was literally repeating back to the human what I’d just been told, and getting them to confirm that what I said was correct. First bill arrives and I find out the truth.
Second case I was told I’d have to cancel and create a new account to add a service. I decided to keep my existing account and learned that there is a web page where I can easily self-serve and add the additional service in one or two clicks. (I assume like the human actually made more money for “new account signups”.
My point is that the feeling of being a valued customer is really independent of whether you’re interacting with a human.
Agreed, I've had humans hallucinate stuff more often than Agents so far in support calls. Many of the customer support agents are just incentives to get you off the phone as fast as possible, and they'll absolutely make stuff up to get you to give up on your quest.
Yes, the game is over, the corps have won. Where the Internet used to be a forum for creativity, it's now a weapon of influence. Where we used to have an anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) playground, we are now monitored more than anywhere else. Where we used to be able to genuinely connect, everything is now artificial and manufactured. And where we once had control, we are now the product.
We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.
The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.
We pretend we're the victims, but none of these platforms would have been built without an army of willing, enthusiastic, highly-paid engineers who made small "ethical compromises" every day.
And now that there's money made in something else, many of us would accept a seven-digit offer from OpenAI in a heartbeat, leaving the task of figuring out the downstream effects to other people.
> The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.
They're also the ones that won't let their kids anywhere near the things.
That really is a strong statement of the ethics here - they're happy to let "those" kids get addicted to it, have it help ruin their mental health and generally create an unhappy generation of narcissists. All sold under the tagline of "Connecting the world". But when it comes to their kids? No way.
I wonder if we'll treat the folks that worked on these things the way we treat the folks that worked at Phillip Morris?
The most powerful force in the universe is not gravity, or the strong nuclear force - it's the prisoner's dilemma.
Don't fool yourself into thinking you could have avoided this. If you didn't, any one of the other ten million people would. You didn't choose for it to happen, you chose to be the one who got the money from it happening.
Mastodon seems to solve the problems for those that use it. It's a genuine social network that people use to talk to each other and form real communites. Not owned or manipulated by any one person or organization, no algorithms or gaming. It's a constant meme that "going viral" on mastodon is when your shitpost gets 50 boosts and likes.
But the same people decrying corporate social media declare mastodon a "failure" because it hasn't captured literally 100% of Facebook users and doesn't male thirty billion dollars. Shrug.
As far as I see the "problem" with mastodon is the lack of addiction mechanics. The first time someone has an negative mastodon interaction, the close the app and because it isn't that addictive, they don't come back.
Meanwhile on Facebook people get angry every day on something they see on the feed yet come back in hour "just in case the are is something interesting this time"
> We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.
Far too much money in tech traces its roots to ad tech.
You are asking all the later gen engineers at major tech firms to blow their salaries up.
There used to be an ethos to do the right thing, however the people who came to tech later aren’t driven by the same values. They (understandably) would like to get paid rather than go on a crusade.
Don’t listen to the defeatists. This is like post-modernism. Post-modernism as a phenonemena is a very real thing, studied and documented extensively, critiqued extensively. And when you read about it it seems hopeless. Like everything is destined to be a pastiche. But once you stop reading about it you realize that there is no Matrix that you’re trapped in. The biggest Matrix is your own mind. People had problems disciplining their minds a millenium ago. They do today as well. It’s marginally more difficult today, yes. But smart phones are just addictive like bad food. Not like a ahrd drug.
We also, thankfully, don’t need a clique of very smart people to save us. We’re all in this together. (Except the psychopaths wanting to enslave us.)
I am going to push back without entirely disagreeing. Most of the people online are definitely caught in this social media as cable tv thing. But the number of people using the internet back in the early days is probably similar or even smaller than the number of people today that use niche areas of the internet, niches that still have that 'playground' experience and much less corporate overwatch control. Maybe?
There's a perspective by which you aren't wrong, and yet everything about how we interact with the Internet has changed in the last decade or so. Because (to quote School of Rock) the world is run by the man.
I think the only reason I remain staunchly independent is because I've never found anything that has had enough common ground with enough people to allow me to profit (to any degree whatsoever) in such a way as to corrupt the core of "me". Oddly I find that the less my venn diagram overlaps with others, the more I like my venn diagram and the more committed I am to it. If other people start agreeing with me, I tend to question where I might be wrong.
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