7 ms·

Don't make me talk to your chatbot

• Molitor5901 8mo ago
  Related: Please don't make me talk to your AI pretend-human complete with Asian accent and background call center sounds. That's even more insulting that a chat bot.
  • titanomachy 8mo ago
    Who did this?
    • knowaveragejoe 8mo ago
      If you haven't experienced it yet, you will soon.
    • Molitor5901 8mo ago
      For me it was a Maryland contracting company, FH Furr, that does electrical, plumbing, etc.
    • morkalork 8mo ago
      https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/retell-ai https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/retell-ai The different accents and call center background noise are features in their product.
    • WD-42 8mo ago
      Listen to the podcast Shell Game.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
• kokanee 8mo ago
  I view the issue of inefficient communication as a problem that will wane as LLMs progress, and a bit idealistic about the efficiency of most human-to-human communication. I feel strongly that we shouldn't be forced to interact with chatbots for a much simpler reason: it's rude. It's dismissive of the time and attention of the person on the other end; it demonstrates laziness or an inability to succeed without cutting corners, and it is an affront to the value of human interaction (regardless of efficiency).
  • ericd 8mo ago
    I feel like that ship sailed long ago with phone trees and hour-long support wait times becoming normal. Not that it's an ideal state of affairs, but I'd much rather talk to a chatbot than wait for an hour for a human who doesn't want to talk to anyone, as long as that chatbot is empowered to solve my problem.
    • anonymous_sorry 8mo ago
      Have you ever had a chatbot solve your problem? I don't think this has ever happened to me. As a reasonably technical user capable of using search, the only way this could really happen is if there was no web/app interface for something I wanted to do, but there was a chatbot/AI interface for it. Perhaps companies will decide to go chatbot-first for these things, and perhaps customers will prefer that. But I doubt it to be honest - do people really want to use a fuzzy-logic CLI instead of a graphical interface? If not, why won't companies just get AI to implement the functionality in their other UIs?
      • ericd 8mo ago
        Actually, I have, Amazon has an excellent one. I had a few exchanges with it, and it initiated a refund for me, it was much quicker than a normal customer service call. Outside of customer service, I'm working on a website that has a huge amount of complexity to it, and would require a much larger interface than normal people would have patience for. So instead, those complex facets are exposed to an LLM as tools it can call, as appropriate based on a discussion with the user, and it can discuss the options with the user to help solve the UI discoverability problem. I don't know yet if it's a good idea, but it does potentially solve one of the big issues with complex products - they can provide a simple interface to extreme complexity without overwhelming the user with an incredibly complex interface and demanding that they spend the time to learn it. Normally, designers handled this instead by just dumbing down every consumer facing product, and I'd love to see how users respond to this other setup.
        • ori_b 8mo ago
• senko 8mo ago
  I thought this was going to be about (customer support) chatbots, which can be a good thing. "Don't make me talk to your [customer support] chatbot" reads like "Don't make me go to an ATM for a cash withdrawal". If I can solve a thing quickly and effectively without waiting forever to speak to an overworked customer support agent on another contitent, I would very much like that! Well, anyways, the post is not about that. It's about posting AI-generated text (blog posts, PR summaries). Which I agree with, although there are a bunch of holes in the argument, such as: > 1. Figure out what you want to say. 2. Say it. That first figuring-out part is important. Well, yeah, I can figure out what I want to say, then have the chatbot say it. So looks like the second part is important, too.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• ivarv 8mo ago
  For a similar take see Cory Doctorow's recent "No one wants to read your AI slop" - https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/02/nonconsensual-slopping/#robowanking https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/02/nonconsensual-slopping/#r...
• tombert 8mo ago
  I guess part of the advantage of being an extremely long-winded writer who makes lots of typos is that people know that what I'm writing is probably written by a human. Though maybe people will start supplying context like "no em dashes, and occasionally misspell a word or two", and soon you won't even be able to tell that.
  • marginalia_nu 8mo ago
    Typos and EM-dashes are not just obvious. They are avoidable. Here's the kicker: Even if you remove those, other AI smells don't just exist. They are obvious.
    • bwat49 8mo ago
      Yeah a trend that I've noticed in online comments is people taking LLM generated text and just removing punctuation and making it all lowercase. It's like dude, it's still so obvious xD
    • tombert 8mo ago
      Maybe, though maybe we're only noticing it when it's obvious? Sort of a survivorship bias thing? Who knows how much of the comments on any website are written by humans now; yeah there are plenty of tells so it can be obvious, but that might only be for the exceptionally bad posts.
      • marginalia_nu 8mo ago
        Maybe. This type of obvious slop is extremely pervasive though, to the point there almost can't be that much undetectable AI writing. Checked LinkedIn and found four posts in a row that had "here's the kicker".
        • tombert 8mo ago
          Yeah, I've also see a lot of "Not X, not Y, just Z" style posts on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has always been a place full of low-effort posts for people trying to self-promote, so I guess it makes sense to have a robot actually do the thinking for something that is and always has been inherently mindless.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• com2kid 8mo ago
  People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. Did we have actual support issues that needed fixing, yes of course. And the insanely high cost of customer support drove us to improve our first use experience. But holy cow people don't realize how expensive support calls are. Edit: To explain some of the costs - This was back when people worked in physical call centers, so first off we were paying for physical office space. Next up training, each CSR had to be trained on our product. This took time and we had to pay for that training time. We also had to write support material, and update that support material for each new version that came out. All of this gets amortized into the cost of support. Because workers tend not to stay long, you pay for a lot of training. Add in all the other costs associated with running a call center and the cost per call, even for off shore call centers, is not cheap. In a reasonable world we'd just raise the price of the product by $x based on what % of people we expect to call in for support (ignore for a minute that estimating that number is hard), but the world isn't reasonable. Downwards price pressure comes from all sides, primarily VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share, and competitors at other FAANGs that are OK burning money to gain market share. The result is that everyone is going to try and reduce support costs because holy cow per user margins are low now days for huge swaths of product categories (Apple's iPhone being a notable exception...)
  • wvenable 8mo ago
    My last experience with a support chatbot was actually pretty decent. It collected all the information, asked followup details, and then fired that whole thing off to a human to deal with. It was perfectly fine.
    • crabmusket 8mo ago
      "smart answering machine" seems like a very apt use case for LLMs, provided the rest of the system works - that a human actually received and acts on the feedback.
• ares623 8mo ago
  Day by day i'm starting to lean towards this take https://anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/haterdom/2025/08/26/i-am-an-ai-hater.html https://anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/haterdom/2025/08/2...
  • patrickmay 8mo ago
    I regret that I have but one upvote to give to this comment.
    • ares623 8mo ago
      You can share it whenever the appropriate comment chain comes up.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
• pizzathyme 8mo ago
  The key thing here is not whether it's AI. The key thing is quality and signal. No one wants to read to a low quality human comment either. If the AI output was actually better than talking to a real human, more useful, more concise, serving the job to be done, then no one would have a problem with it. In fact they would appreciate it. That future is not here in many areas. The problem is people are wielding AI right now and either [a] the models they are using are not good enough, [b] they aren't being given enough context, or [c] they are deployed in a way that makes it sloppy (Insert joke about whether this comment is AI. It's not, but joke away)
  • metalliqaz 8mo ago
    No it isn't. I really do not care what the LLM has to say. If a person has taken the (substantial) time necessary to fill the context with enough information that something interesting comes out, I would much rather they simply give me the inputs. The middleman is just digested Internet text. I've already got one of those on my end.
    • andrewaylett 8mo ago
      That does somewhat depend on the size of the context. LLMs won't add information to context, so if the output is larger than the input then it's slop. They're much better at picking information out of context. If I have a corpus of information and prompt an extraction, the result may well contain more information than the prompt. It's not necessarily feasible to transfer the entire context, and also I've curated that specific result as suitably conveying the message I intend to convey. This does all take effort. My take is also that I am interested in what people say: I have priors for how worthwhile I expect it to be to read stuff written by various people, and I will update my priors when they give me things to read. If they give me slop, that's going to affect what I think of them, and I expect the same in return. I'm willing to work quite hard to avoid asking my colleagues to read or review slop.
      • cbsmith 8mo ago
        > LLMs won't add information to context, so if the output is larger than the input then it's slop That doesn't align with my observations. A lot of times they are able to add information to context. Sure it's information I could have added myself, but they save me the time. They also do a great job of taking relatively terse context and expanding upon it so that it is more accessible to someone who lacks context. Brevity is often preferable, but that doesn't mean larger input is necessarily slop.
• onion2k 8mo ago
  There's been a lot of "the world doesn't work the way I want it to" on HN recently. I suspect this is a function of an aging readership more than anything particularly groundbreaking about hot takes on the up and coming tech. "Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." Douglas Adams
  • WD-42 8mo ago
    Do you enjoy reading slop? I fail to see how this is a controversial take.
    • Ajakks 8mo ago
      You act as if the internet was like a high society book club - all the previous articles were written by ivy league grads. I recall geocities, angelfire, all the chans. The internet has always been a cesspool with little islands of quality floating in a proverbial sewage of human output. In theory AI slop will improve. A racist, sexist, ignorant online community of humans 20 years ago, if it is still active, is almost certainly still a racist, sexist, and ignorant community today.
      • WD-42 8mo ago
        So your straw man is that the internet already had bad stuff on it? Cmon, you can do better. Adding more bad to bad is still bad.
        • Ajakks 8mo ago
          Where did I strawman? And might be the 1st time in my life that I was strawmanned, with an accusation of pulling a strawman - thats pretty fantastic actually, I'll give you that. Otherwise I wrote a book on the other comment on this - you should check that out.
      • sfink 8mo ago
        Being able to name especially egregious forums is the point. AI slop isn't worse than preceding slop, but it is more widespread, partly because it's more socially acceptable than racism, sexism, and ignorance, and partly because it's harder to identify. Similarly, email spam that is easy to automatically categorize is not a problem. Making slop less sloppy makes the problem worse, not better. You could claim that that's only up to a threshold, but there's a pretty strong information theoretic argument against that.
• red75prime 8mo ago
  I have a shorter, more cynical version of this: if a person doesn’t provide enough input to a chatbot, I’d be better off talking to the chatbot directly.
• arewethereyeta 8mo ago
  Amen! All our banks introduced this we cannot talk to a human unless it's fraud.
• TimFogarty 8mo ago
  I have noticed that my writing ability has atrophied since I was writing essays in school. Now at work most of my writing is slack messages. Writing longer more thoughtful pieces about strategy or performance review has become a slog. I suspect that a lot of people have had a similar experience so offloading the pain of writing to an LLM is appealing. But frankly LLMs suck at writing. It's not only formulaic, it's uninspired!! So I worry that we're entering an era of mediocre writing. I like the "Have you considered writing?" suggestion. I've been trying to make a habit of writing book reviews so I can counter some of the writing atrophy I've developed. Hopefully it will help me become a better thinker too. As Ray says here: "Understanding your own point of view is an enriching exercise."
  • zahlman 8mo ago
    > I have noticed that my writing ability has atrophied since I was writing essays in school. Seems to me like you're doing fine so far. (I hope I haven't just been letting my standards go down the drain...) > It's not only formulaic, it's uninspired! Heh.
• SaberTail 8mo ago
  The "figure out what you want to say" is key. I've started to think of LLMs, at least in a business setting, as misunderstanding amplifiers. How many times at work have you been talking to someone else where they're using common words as jargon? Maybe it's something like "the online system" or "the platform". And it's perfectly clear to them what they mean, but everyone else in the company either doesn't know what that actually is, or they have a distorted idea based on the conventional definitions of the words. Even without LLMs in the mix, this can lead to people coming out of meetings with completely different understandings of what's going on. My experience is few people are actually providing the relevant context to the LLM to explain what they mean in situations like this. Or they don't have the actual knowledge and are using the LLM in the hopes it'll fill in for their ignorance. The LLMs are RLHFed to sound confident, so they won't convey that they don't know what a piece of jargon means. Instead they'll use a combination of the common meaning and the rest of the context to invent something. When this gets copy/pasted and sent around, it causes everyone who isn't familiar to get the wrong idea. Hence "misunderstanding amplifier". To the point of the article, this is soluble if people take the time to actually figure out what they are trying to convey. But if they did that, they wouldn't need the LLM in the first place.
  • LorenPechtel 8mo ago
    And that people and the systems actually know the relevant terms. I recently was dealing with the Amazon robot--after correctly identifying the items in the order it then proceeded to use short terms which were wrong, but make sense as what a classifier might have spit out. Instead of understanding being a shared thing it falls entirely on the user. Sufficiently adept user, this is fine. But a lot of users aren't sufficient adept.
• aprentic 8mo ago
  People want to spend as little as possible while getting support for their product as long as possible. Companies want people to spend as much as possible while doing the minimum work on the product. Chatbots let companies spend almost nothing while pretending to provide long-term support. I wonder if something similar to a copyleft license could help. What if there was a contractual "fair business" pledge that companies could add? I imagine that good enough lawyers could craft something that essentially said, "You can only display this contract if you legally guarantee that you do X, Y, Z and do not do A, B C."
• jmyeet 8mo ago
  I'm reminded of the Air Canada customer service chatbot. It completely made up a refund policy (and there are still people on HN who insist LLMs don't hallucinate) and a court ruled the company had to honor it [1]. The only way to deal with this is to make the implentation not worth it by constantly bypassing it to speak to a human and/or making it cost money by getting it to give you things you're not otherwise entitled to. I really wonder how these things will handle prompt injection and similar things. I have no confidence any of this is secure. Wait until this comes to healthcare and it'll be chatbots handling appeals to prior authorization denials, wasting even more physician time. [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/air-canada-chatbot-refund-policy/ https://www.wired.com/story/air-canada-chatbot-refund-policy...
• daft_pink 8mo ago
  I just signed up with Gusto for one of my companies. They charged me for premium support automatically and when I tried to dispute it I had to talk in circles with their AI named Gus. Why am I paying through the nose for premium support just to chat with an AI?
  • trollbridge 8mo ago
    Hence why I prefer a real CPA with a real person who answers the phone.
  • jascha_eng 8mo ago
    This is not really what the article is about
  • user3939382 8mo ago
    Gusto is a nightmare if your account needs fall out of their happy path. Everything is 100% automated with call center scripts to help you otherwise. You will never reach someone with power to fix anything.
• ifokiedoke 8mo ago
  Reading almost all the comments gives me the sad validation that people truly do not read the article before commenting... This article is not about support chatbots. It's about clearing up your writing/thoughts and communicating clearly even if you used a chatbot to get there.
  • padjo 8mo ago
    It's absolutely miserable isn't it. People see a headline, decide they have an important thing they must tell the world and just blurt it out. Imagine doing this in conversation. You'd overhear a fragment of conversation and just interject with some semi related bullshit that makes you feel smart and then leave.
    • Capricorn2481 8mo ago
      People on HN spend most of their time congratulating themselves on how they aren't like other social media platforms, but do the exact same crap anyways. When it comes to technical discussions, there are so many people on here just regurgitating what they read on an earlier thread. Maybe to test if what they heard was true. Maybe because they just want to sound smart. Not a lot of people actually trying things.
  • davis 8mo ago
    I can't believe I had to scroll this long to see this comment. Like what the heck is wrong with people on this site. I thought I clicked the wrong comment section.
    • zikani_03 8mo ago
      I also thought the same thing. Had to double take and scroll to see I'm not alone. It's an interesting phenomenon, I suspect the title was too on the nose that it invokes an immediate reaction. Anyways, I wish more people commented on what's actually in the article - i've observed what OP is complaining about happening in whatsapp groups too esp when there is a difference of opinion; people defer to calling Meta's in-chat AI instead of giving a bit more effort and stating _their_ view.
• this_user 8mo ago
  I don't know, occasionally there are some funny results. For instance, I have managed to get AWS' support bot to start smack talking their platform and criticising its often needlessly complex and sometimes incoherent design before cheekily offering to help me make my relative simple setup even more complex and enterprise-ready.
• hungryhobbit 8mo ago
  I find chatbot conversations to be incredibly similar to dreams. It's human nature to want to share your dreams, because they are fascinating to you. However, it's also human nature to want to punch someone in the face when they start talking about this crazy dream they had last night ... because it has nothing to do with you, and doesn't interest you at all. Similarly, when an AI says something useful to you, in response to your prompts, it's very particular to you. When you try to share it with others ... you get the article.
• hidelooktropic 8mo ago
  It matters less to me that the helper is an AI/human than the kind of help I'm getting. The bigger problem to me is "help" is always framed as my needing to be educated, not a problem with the service. This is especially prevalent for technical customers who are legitimately trying to draw attention to a bug in the platform only to get how-to help articles pasted back to them.
  • LorenPechtel 8mo ago
    Or technical customers with a case that was not handled properly. I'm thinking of long, long ago, ISP changed the Usenet server and didn't document it--not on their website, not with their tech support. It shouldn't have taken an hour and a third level support person to get we changed providers, here's the new address. First two levels simply couldn't comprehend that it was not a third party system that I was having trouble with.
  • xmprt 8mo ago
    > "help" is always framed as my needing to be educated For many users, this is often the case, and front line AI support like this can handle that pretty effectively while giving your case faster live support. Would you rather sit behind 4 people in the queue trying to figure out why their device doesn't work without batteries when it's not plugged in or have them deal with AI to solve the problem while you get your real issue sorted out quickly after dealing with a handful of basic prompts?
    • hidelooktropic 8mo ago
      I agree that's why I would prefer to have AI if it does the job better and if it can be further trained to understand when to escalate in the case of a more technical user which I have found humans rarely do.
    • devilbunny 8mo ago
      I wouldn't mind, if it ended up getting me a human at the end of the process. It's not quite at the level of the "shibboleet" XKCD, but I did once manage to get a much higher support tier at Comcast who was able to verify that 1) I had a problem that was their fault and 2) fix it. Even that guy was halfway on a script. Y'know, after I've read you a ping timeout three times from the Windows command line, I probably shouldn't have to read it verbatim to you again. It hasn't changed.
• cerved 8mo ago
  I instruct Claude to write like peff, writes much better commit messages now
• namegulf 8mo ago
  To start with, for qualifying the chat it's okay for a chatbot to ask some quick questions so that it can connect with the right person. Forcing a customer anything beyond that is RUDE!
• kazinator 8mo ago
  I don't mind talking to a chatbot if solves problems and doesn't go in circles. Don't make me talk to a chatbot while there is zero forward progress in solving the problem.
• mrandish 8mo ago
  As a customer, I just want the information I need. While I don't want to talk to a chatbot, I also don't want to talk to a human - and for the same reason: they usually don't have the info I need. That's the aspect I don't understand. The information I want is almost always something some other customers have asked already. I'd much prefer to avoid their customer support maze entirely and help myself on a searchable wiki. Unfortunately, most company's online product support FAQs usually only contain answers to obvious shit on the order of RTFM and "is it plugged in." Why not just post the doc their advanced tier 3 support people share amongst themselves? It can be under a warning label like 'preliminary advanced info for engineers'. I realize people like me represent only around 2-3% of the customers seeking support but it's 2-3% that is able to self-serve and takes more time than average because we invariably have to work through front-line support to get escalated to someone with the non-obvious info that's still been asked many times before. So maybe we're only ~2% but we suck up 4% of support bandwidth and we probably take up closer to ~20% of Tier 3 support - the most expensive, scarce type.
  • zzo38computer 8mo ago
    I mostly agree (although sometimes it is necessary to talk to someone about it); it would be better to actually have good documentation (so that you do not need to talk to someone about it). A warning label like you mention is a possibility if that is considered to be necessary, although I think it might be better to have a file that you can download and read (or request by mail or telephone or fax, if this becomes necessary in some circumstances; do not assume the computer always works and is compatible with your file), instead of a searchable wiki.
• laalshaitaan 8mo ago
  The worst part isn't that chatbots are bad at their job. It's that teams shipping them genuinely don't know how bad they are. Nobody's reading the conversations, so nobody catches users hitting dead ends, rage-clicking, or dropping off right after a failed session. The data exists, it just sits there unread.
• guerython 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• aiwrita 8mo ago
  Nice
• lemoncookiechip 8mo ago
  I don't care if it's a human, a chatbot, or a dog if they fix my problem. I don't want to contact customer support in the first place, if I'm forced to, it's because something is very wrong and in that case I don't want to be listening to elevator music and "your call is important to us, please hold" for an hour, and get my call disconnected forcing me to call again. Issue is that I've yet to have a chatbot actually fix my issues, or most 1st contact human operators for that matter.
  • appreciatorBus 8mo ago
    The article wasn't about customer support chat bots at all.
• hatthew 8mo ago
  Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.
  • TZubiri 8mo ago
    Remember when LLMs were entering the mainstream, and everyone shared tips on how to superprompt, and one of the hot tips was to tell the AI to write a prompt itself? Like: BAD: "Write the specs for a system that does X Y and Z" GOOD: "Write me a prompt to write the specs for a system that does X Y and Z." As if the LLM magically knew all about itself and the best tips and tricks to prompt itself even if it had just came out and there was no scraped information on how to use them yet.
  • charcircuit 8mo ago
    It's not possible to directly transfer 300 bits of information as that would require a form of telepathy. If it takes 1000 bits of English to distribute something that represents your idea properly it is useful to have a tool to create those 1000s bits instead of doing it manually character by character.
    • hatthew 8mo ago
      Sorry I wasn't very clear. TFA is talking about using LLMs to write things from scratch, not just to clean up grammar for example. In that context, I was talking about bits of semantic information, not bits of English text information. You might have 300 bits of semantic information in your mind, and then you have to expand that to, say, 600 bits of English text to give to the LLM. If you're using the LLM purely to turn bullet points into prose, it'll add more bits of English, but not more bits of (useful) semantic information. I prompted Claude with "(information theory) difference between semantic information and english text information in the context of using LLMs for writing": https://claude.ai/share/5925245a-0893-46ba-bca9-30627d4facbc https://claude.ai/share/5925245a-0893-46ba-bca9-30627d4facbc If you're familiar with LLMs and information theory, the LLM isn't giving you any semantic information that you don't already know. If you aren't familiar with LLMs and information theory, you can learn about them from google and/or your own LLM, using that prompt for keywords. In either case, the LLM's response isn't very helpful, because it's not my ideas that you are reading, it's random information pulled from the internet (directly or indirectly), and it's not actually the semantic information I wanted to convey. This comment is more useful than the LLM's, because every word is chosen to convey the ideas in my mind as clearly as possible in the context of this article and conversation. It's also half as many words to read.
• einpoklum 8mo ago
  > We increasingly use coding agents to create PRs. No we don't, and neither should you. Don't make me read your chatbot's PR.
• jfreds 8mo ago
  AI pull request descriptions are my current pet peeve. The ones I have seen are verbose and filled with meaningless fluff words (“optimized”, “performant” for what? In terms of what?), they leak details about the CoT that didn’t make it into the final solution (“removed the SQLite implementation” what SQLite implementation? There isn’t one on main…), and are devoid of context about _why_ the work is even being done, what alternatives were considered etc. My first round of code review has become a back and forth with the original author just asking them questions about their description, before I even bother to look at code. At first I decided I’d just be a stick in the mud and juniors would learn to get it right the first time, but it turns out I’m just burning myself out due to spite instead.
• causal 8mo ago
  I have found that chatbots embedded in some spaces can be useful, e.g. docs. Stagehand for example embeds a little query form at the bottom of their docs page, and I've found the chatbot it engages can quickly direct me to the documentation I'm looking for: https://docs.stagehand.dev/v3/first-steps/introduction https://docs.stagehand.dev/v3/first-steps/introduction
• geauxvirtual 8mo ago
  The only Chatbot I've semi-enjoyed interacting with was SiriusXM during my latest yearly try to cancel dance they make you go through. Usually this was a 45 minute to an hour phone call with Customer Support to eventually get a cheaper rate and continue service. This last time, it sent me to a Chatbot. In five minutes, I got a cheaper rate than I was previously paying. I'm sort of looking forward to the next interaction to see if I can get even cheaper rates or finally cancel the service.
  • dylan604 8mo ago
    Maybe you can get a Trump >100% discount from the bot if you keep at it. It's unfortunate that you keep accepting their lower rate though. If a very small percentage of people are willing to continue paying even at slightly lower rates the the vast majority of people, it is still earning them money. Maybe you really didn't want to cancel? I always thought wanting to cancel was black and white, but you've turned it into shades of gray.
• appreciatorBus 8mo ago
  This submission might be an HN record for highest % of commenters who skipped reading the article. I'm sure it's always high but so far there are 125 comments and maybe 3 or 4 referencing what was in the actual article.
  • edot 8mo ago
    Yes, from the title and first few comments I thought it was about getting customer support and having to talk to a chatbot first. For anyone else who didn't read, this article is about how mindlessly copy-pasting LLM output is comparable to "making me talk to your chatbot".
    • DonHopkins 8mo ago
      "Don't make me read your blog"
    • anal_reactor 8mo ago
      Honestly I pretty much never actually read the articles and I don't see anything wrong with that. HN is more like discussion club, and the article is just a starting point for the discussion. If the discussion stays on topic that's great, if it moves onto better topics that's even better.
  • godelski 8mo ago
    Do us all a favor and down vote those posts. I do, because I agree with the author and it doesn't matter if the text was human or AI generated. And if you're reading this and confused by my comment, try to RTFA, it's not long
• adamtaylor_13 8mo ago
  I agree in principle, but, for me, it all comes down to execution. I used a product that implemented a VERY good AI chatbot as part of their email support and it was better than human support. It was nearly instant in its response time and answered all of my questions perfectly. In fact, it wasn't until after the interaction that I realized it was an AI bot! Pretty good IMO and I'd prefer that interaction over holding "...because your call IS important to us."
  • RayVR 8mo ago
    Did you read the article? Author is talking about humans relying on chatbots to formulate all their responses for them without strict direction and refinement.
    • adamtaylor_13 8mo ago
      I did, but it immediately made me think of other contexts where I have been forced to use someone's chatbot and it was delightful.
  • bendangelo 8mo ago
    Which product?
    • adamtaylor_13 8mo ago
      The product was Freedom[1] and I believe they were using Fin[2] for their email support. - [^1]: https://freedom.to https://freedom.to - [^2]: https://fin.ai https://fin.ai
• mazone 8mo ago
  How about the trend that people just copy paste AI responses back to you in slack.
• Juminuvi 8mo ago
  100% agree. Hopefully etiquette will catch up if enough folks talk about this. Side note, the number of comments here from people who clearly didn’t read the article is impressive
• godelski 8mo ago
  > The only acceptable pro-AI response to the accusation of AI Slop is to join team Anti-Slop. I'll never understand why this is controversial. Especially in techie and engineering communities. We of all people love to be grumpy. It's in our nature because the first step to solving problems is recognizing them. Sweeping shit under the rug is for business people who's only interest is money and have no care for the product
• foxglacier 8mo ago
  Some people deserve it because they already write in a vague overly diplomatic, bloated way that's hard to extract the core meaning from - or has no meaning underneath all the words. Schoolteachers, I mean you. I'm happy using AI to email teachers because they might as well be human-powered AIs themselves. We do need to be more tolerant of AI writing though. Some people need it because they can't express their ideas well themselves. You wouldn't say "no wheeled vehicles allowed inside" because that would exclude handicapped people who need wheelchairs.
• tl2do 8mo ago
  The article doesn't address where human oversight is actually necessary. I sometimes use AI for simple spell checking—requiring human review for that would be over-complication. In some more difficult tasks, having AI review AI output works fine for me.
• data-ottawa 8mo ago
  Topical, but not related to the article: I just had the worst experience with corporate AI chatbot. Apparently my mobile provider switched to a voice chatbot only phone system in September. I called them today because of a price increase and some weird long distance charges on my bill. I call, the chatbot answers, I confirm my account info and enter my PIN then ask it “why did my price go up”, “your price went up because we made a change to your account”. Wow, super. I ask it if it can reduce the price, no. I ask it about the long distance charges and it tells me to check my account statement online. I ask to be transferred to an human and it asks why, but it does transfer me over to their callback system. As a first line of support defence, that wasn’t so bad. The timing of the transfer is off so I only hear half of what the callback system says. It requires me to verify the number I want to be called back on, then I tells me I can type in a time I want the callback. I think to myself, is this 24 hour time, how does AM/PM work, what time-slots are available, how do those work? While I’m thinking about all of this it repeats the instructions. I type in 1 minute into the future because I don’t want to waste my own time waiting, just please call me back ASAP. “That time was unavailable”. I guess that makes sense, it’s very soon and maybe slots are on 5 minute windows. I have to confirm my phone number again and I can enter a new time. I try 10 minutes from now, that’s on a clean 5 minute boundary. Nope. Confirm again and try the nearest 15 minute boundary. Nope — and this time it hangs up and I have to call back and start from zero. I call back and explain to the bot (again) that I need to talk a human, it’s a billing issue, thanks. It fails to understand me and that seems to get it stuck in a loop. After two more turns it asking me to repeat myself I hang up and call back again. This time the bot does understands me and I try 3 more callback times for today, all of which fail, and it hangs up. I’ve just spent 10 minutes talking to a wall and punching in numbers. The phone wall is clearly unassailable — all paths lead to the broken callback subsystem. I try the text chat bot on the site. I convince it to put me in contact with a human chat operator, who I then have to convince it’s worth it for them to call me because he couldn’t help me and it took over 1 minute per chat turn/iteration. Finally a human calls me! Before we can talk I need to open a text, click the link, then enter the code she tells me, then enter my account PIN. It felt like I might be getting phished, this required such a weird chain of info. She tells me they put a notice of the price increase in my December bill (which was the right amount, so I didn’t read it), so this is all above board. She says if I want a cheaper plan I should check the app and she won’t even tell me what the options are. I ask if they’ll price match competitors and she says no. At this point I told her I was considering leaving if they won’t price match (and also that the new support service was very bad). She says she’s sorry to hear that, to check the app, then pauses and asks me if I’m happy with my internet services, as if anything about our interaction says “please sign me up with more services!” I know they have to ask about the upsell because they always do, but wow. The entire reason I’ve been a customer so long was that for a decade I would call and within 5 minutes be able to update my account to a new plan. Usually the support staff were nice and could offer me some loyalty discount, and I was happy. I just (as in just) finished cancelling my entire account, then checked HN, and “Don’t make me talk to your chatbot” is the top article. Serendipity at its finest.
• avatardeejay 8mo ago
  I definitely lean pro AI, and I feel an air of condescension here that doesn't thrill me. But, it wasn't overwhelming and the point does kind of resonate. I see it in a reddit post, or a twitter comment, I've suspected it in text messages. And like that angle, the like "you're a human. can you please, just" and feeling a little out there for pouring my soul into every word I right wherever it is, like, that idea resonates. That frustration to be reading a lengthy blurb in what's become an over-saturated style where I have to work even harder to discern their real meaning than if they were actually that verbose to begin with.
• jackyli02 8mo ago
  To avoid "AI barging into human conversations unsolicited", you can either stop the AI from barging in, or remove the premise that this is a "human conversation". The latter might be easier.
• maxglute 8mo ago
  Kids who grew up without phone culture wait for caller to say hello when they pickup the phone. Wonder what changes we'll see with kids who grew up with chatbot .