<story><title>If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it</title><url>https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/if-ai-chatbots-are-future-i-hate-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oliwarner</author><text>I think your opinion stems from never having dealt with &lt;i&gt;normal people&lt;/i&gt; interfacing with a &lt;i&gt;technical product&lt;/i&gt;. They&amp;#x27;re not asking the same questions you or I might, they&amp;#x27;re asking documented questions and they&amp;#x27;re doing it in obscene volume, with such little ability to help themselves.&lt;p&gt;ISPs probably take the cup for worst ratio of technical issues to technical idiots. It&amp;#x27;s not just a modem, there&amp;#x27;s a line, an internal network and a really bothersome user all working against optimal service.&lt;p&gt;Your desire to handle that all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language meat-bags is lovely but you&amp;#x27;d be bankrupt in a week.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t new. We&amp;#x27;ve had customer service levels for decades. What happened before is you talked to non-technical staff following scripts before escalation. Then that model pushed those staff overseas. Now the lowest rung is a LLM. The trick they have to re-learn when to let the user tell you to step back and fetch a real person. That, and getting the tone of the LLM to not declare everything as if that&amp;#x27;ll definitely fix the problem.</text></item><item><author>FL410</author><text>The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. It was bad enough outsourcing customer support to overseas agents who have their hands tied to only read from a script and generally do nothing, and now we&amp;#x27;re just talking to computers that can generally do nothing. The message is the same: we don&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; care about our customers.&lt;p&gt;I own a small business and I would rather shut my doors than force my paying customers through AI cattle gates to struggle for help. I can understand that providing customer support on a massive scale is &lt;i&gt;hard&lt;/i&gt;, but it is arguably the MOST important part of the customer experience, maybe even more so than the product itself. It seems incomprehensibly short-sighted to abstract it away in the name of short-term profits.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>syncbehind</author><text>&amp;gt;Your desire to handle that all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language meat-bags is lovely but you&amp;#x27;d be bankrupt in a week.&lt;p&gt;This sentiment is, in essence,  the problem. It&amp;#x27;s perfectly logical for this trend of distancing customers from their , as you put it, &amp;quot;all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language-meat-bags&amp;quot; when you start with the core concept that the _only_ purpose of a company is to earn capital.</text></comment>
<story><title>If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it</title><url>https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/if-ai-chatbots-are-future-i-hate-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oliwarner</author><text>I think your opinion stems from never having dealt with &lt;i&gt;normal people&lt;/i&gt; interfacing with a &lt;i&gt;technical product&lt;/i&gt;. They&amp;#x27;re not asking the same questions you or I might, they&amp;#x27;re asking documented questions and they&amp;#x27;re doing it in obscene volume, with such little ability to help themselves.&lt;p&gt;ISPs probably take the cup for worst ratio of technical issues to technical idiots. It&amp;#x27;s not just a modem, there&amp;#x27;s a line, an internal network and a really bothersome user all working against optimal service.&lt;p&gt;Your desire to handle that all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language meat-bags is lovely but you&amp;#x27;d be bankrupt in a week.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t new. We&amp;#x27;ve had customer service levels for decades. What happened before is you talked to non-technical staff following scripts before escalation. Then that model pushed those staff overseas. Now the lowest rung is a LLM. The trick they have to re-learn when to let the user tell you to step back and fetch a real person. That, and getting the tone of the LLM to not declare everything as if that&amp;#x27;ll definitely fix the problem.</text></item><item><author>FL410</author><text>The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. It was bad enough outsourcing customer support to overseas agents who have their hands tied to only read from a script and generally do nothing, and now we&amp;#x27;re just talking to computers that can generally do nothing. The message is the same: we don&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; care about our customers.&lt;p&gt;I own a small business and I would rather shut my doors than force my paying customers through AI cattle gates to struggle for help. I can understand that providing customer support on a massive scale is &lt;i&gt;hard&lt;/i&gt;, but it is arguably the MOST important part of the customer experience, maybe even more so than the product itself. It seems incomprehensibly short-sighted to abstract it away in the name of short-term profits.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AnimalMuppet</author><text>My dad&amp;#x27;s ISP did exactly what you say is impossible.  It was a small ISP in Salt Lake City (xmission, if anyone cares).  They had actual humans answering the phone, and no bankruptcies.</text></comment>