[andai]

>bias towards speaking to a human on the phone

Hatred of phone calls aside, I heard an interesting take from Alex Hormozi (paraphrased): "You're on the phone and you say, are you human? No? Oh thank God, because you know the AI has a thousand times more experience than all the humans combined."

[mort96]

Is that supposed to be a serious opinion about contemporary AI..?

Because that's crazy to me. Humans can be reasoned with. AI can't. My experience with the likes of ChatGPT tells me that if the AI is wrong about something (which it very very often is), there's no point trying to explain to it that it's wrong or how it's wrong, it will say something like "You are right, sorry for the confusion." and follow up with the same or a similar error again.

AI might eventually become an alright first line, but losing the option to speak with a human -- an intelligent entity which can actually be reasoned with -- seems dystopic.

[RufusJacksons]

Having worked in customer service before, the only time customers tried to reason with me was when they were wrong. For at least a large portion of customer service calls, the ability to reason is a negative. Customer calls to say the product is faulty, and with a simple question they admit they didn’t connect the ground wire. They then try to reason with me that they deserve a warranty replacement because their mum just got cancer - fuck reason on cs calls. (Reason might still have a place on complex situations [which yours never is], customer retainment, sales etc)

Even as the top tier tech support for a complex product, 99% of my calls could have been dealt with well by chat gpt in its current form. And my customers would have a more concise outcome, without the variability of my mood, hold times, judgement of their tone etc to effect my advice.

I can’t wait for more ai cs so I can stop talking to a fuckwhit, and talk to an ai that’s almost certainly far more equipped to handle my query.

[mort96]

I'm not talking about a customer arguing that they deserve warranty. I mean if the human CS agent misunderstands the problem, the customer can explain the problem better and try to make the human CS agent understand. If the "AI" CS agent misunderstands the problem, there is no recourse.

[nottorp]

Not to mention when you have a problem the AI hasn't been trained for.

With humans you have a chance to escalate. With a chatbot, you might as well take your business somewhere else.

[andai]

These things already exist (primitive form) and most of them already have the option to escalate.

It's usually well hidden though, to save money.

[andai]

> Is that supposed to be a serious opinion about contemporary AI..?

No. We're talking about the future. ChatGPT doesn't have millions of hours of customer service experience. It has zero!

(Well, unless you count the RLHF stuff, but my point is it isn't actually learning from human feedback, although we don't actually know what they're doing with those thumbs up / down buttons...)

> losing the option to speak with a human

Already the case at many companies, sadly. (In those cases, if not elsewhere, it's going to be a significant improvement.)

[Aerbil313]

> an intelligent entity which can actually be reasoned with

We're just too impatient to wait for GPT-7 aren't we?

[brabel]

I think that's a point a lot of people are missing. If AI can already talk about certain topics better than most humans, imagine in the future. There may be a time when talking to humans may become really underwhelming compared to all-knowing AIs.

[Mordisquitos]

Why have all-knowing customer-support AIs waste their time and resources talking with underwhelming human customers such as myself? It would be much more efficient for customer support calls to be made by all-knowing personal assistant AIs, which can surely explain the nature of the problem much better than me, as well as being better able to infallibly put in practice whatever the all-knowing customer-support AI suggested.

[layer8]

Even better, they may be able to prompt-inject the support AI to actually escalate the support case.

[the_other]

The AI will have more experience composing bullshit put-offs, but even less access to the systems that control the systems that are exhibiting problems customers currently experience. We'll see the problem of layered customer-service (where the first two layers have no power, other than to maybe turn on some pre-configured bonus/offset/coupon) made worse by further automation.

[animuchan]

Maybe in future. Right now it's infuriating and miserable, to the point I will absolutely switch any service provider the moment they subject me to this torture. Old systems with "Press 1 to talk to a person" were bad enough, the AI-based ones are so much worse.