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Amazon started using AI for support a while back. The only time I've had to interact with it: it asked the right questions, came to the appropriate course of ac

Amazon started using AI for support a while back. The only time I've had to interact with it: it asked the right questions, came to the appropriate course of action, told me the correct things, and then did the exact opposite on the backend which then required me to track down an actual human (quickly successfully I might add) to fix it.

mhuffman 3y ago
Klarna has the added benefit that their service was zero before this, so the AI assistant is actually doing infinite amount of more work! And it is probably much better than the zero service before!
- MonkeyClub 3y ago
  > And it is probably much better than the zero service before! Or infinitely worse.
r_hendricks 3y ago
Same experience. It felt like the AI was trained on human agent chats but the agent actions were left out of the training.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I had an interesting experience with an AI support call a few days ago (not with Amazon). The LLM was being unhelpful and completely failing to understand what my problem was. Eventually, I resorted to just repeating "I want to talk to a human", which would result in a response like (paraphrasing) "I understand that you want to speak with a human, but tough.". Eventually I lost patience completely and said "I just want to talk to a fucking human". At which point the AI's speaking tone changed completely and became very curt. It didn't get me the needed support (I never got support and will no longer do any business with that company), but I found it pretty hilarious.
  - eszed 3y ago
    Ten years or so ago the first phone trees with speech recognition were generally trained to recognize profanity and transfer the call to a human. I got great results, for a while, by opening every call with a string of expletives. That trick's mostly stopped working, but I still try sometimes, just for fun.
- sph 3y ago
  Because what you call AI is not intelligent. Imagine if it starts to hallucinate that to solve your problem it needs to delete your account, and it has the power to do so.
aitchnyu 3y ago
I thought Amazon (at least in India) uses the bot to sort the busywork of "I see your recent orders, do you want to ACTION upon ORDER" and let a human take final call.
Pesthuf 3y ago
It probably has a conflicting prompt that tells it to help the customer to the best of its ability and to provide the most helpful information, but also to do what's ultimately the best for the company.
sph 3y ago
What I usually do when I open a live chat and I'm talking to a bot: write "I want to speak to an agent" repeatedly until I am talking to a human. My life is too short to interact with a language model that is as smart, and with as much power as a Magic 8 Ball. I loathe the day I will be told by a machine "have you tried turning it off and on again?"

mhuffman 3y ago

Klarna has the added benefit that their service was zero before this, so the AI assistant is actually doing infinite amount of more work! And it is probably much better than the zero service before!

MonkeyClub 3y ago
> And it is probably much better than the zero service before! Or infinitely worse.

r_hendricks 3y ago

Same experience. It felt like the AI was trained on human agent chats but the agent actions were left out of the training.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
JohnFen 3y ago
I had an interesting experience with an AI support call a few days ago (not with Amazon). The LLM was being unhelpful and completely failing to understand what my problem was. Eventually, I resorted to just repeating "I want to talk to a human", which would result in a response like (paraphrasing) "I understand that you want to speak with a human, but tough.". Eventually I lost patience completely and said "I just want to talk to a fucking human". At which point the AI's speaking tone changed completely and became very curt. It didn't get me the needed support (I never got support and will no longer do any business with that company), but I found it pretty hilarious.
- eszed 3y ago
  Ten years or so ago the first phone trees with speech recognition were generally trained to recognize profanity and transfer the call to a human. I got great results, for a while, by opening every call with a string of expletives. That trick's mostly stopped working, but I still try sometimes, just for fun.
sph 3y ago
Because what you call AI is not intelligent. Imagine if it starts to hallucinate that to solve your problem it needs to delete your account, and it has the power to do so.

aitchnyu 3y ago

I thought Amazon (at least in India) uses the bot to sort the busywork of "I see your recent orders, do you want to ACTION upon ORDER" and let a human take final call.

Pesthuf 3y ago

It probably has a conflicting prompt that tells it to help the customer to the best of its ability and to provide the most helpful information, but also to do what's ultimately the best for the company.

sph 3y ago

What I usually do when I open a live chat and I'm talking to a bot: write "I want to speak to an agent" repeatedly until I am talking to a human. My life is too short to interact with a language model that is as smart, and with as much power as a Magic 8 Ball. I loathe the day I will be told by a machine "have you tried turning it off and on again?"