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Half of companies planning to replace customer service with AI are reversing course

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  • I use it almost every day, and most of those days, it says something incorrect. That's okay for my purposes because I can plainly see that it's incorrect. I'm using it as an assistant, and I'm the one who is deciding whether to take its not-always-reliable advice.

    I would HARDLY contemplate turning it loose to handle things unsupervised. It just isn't that good, or even close.

    These CEOs and others who are trying to replace CSRs are caught up in the hype from Eric Schmidt and others who proclaim "no programmers in 4 months" and similar. Well, he said that about 2 months ago and, yeah, nah. Nah.

    If that day comes, it won't be soon, and it'll take many, many small, hard-won advancements. As they say, there is no free lunch in AI.

    I gave chatgpt a burl writing a batch file, the stupid thing was putting REM on the same line as active code and then not understanding why it didn't work

  • You're wrong but I'm glad we agree.

    I'm not wrong. There's mountains of research demonstrating that LLMs encode contextual relationships between words during training.

    There's so much more happening beyond "predicting the next word". This is one of those unfortunate "dumbing down the science communication" things. It was said once and now it's just repeated non-stop.

    If you really want a better understanding, watch this video:

    And before your next response starts with "but Apple..."

    Their paper has had many holes poked into it already. Also, it's not a coincidence their paper released just before their WWDC event which had almost zero AI stuff in it. They flopped so hard on AI that they even have class action lawsuits against them for their false advertising. In fact, it turns out that a lot of their AI demos from last year were completely fabricated and didn't exist as a product when they announced them. Even some top Apple people only learned of those features during the announcements.

    Apple's paper on LLMs is completely biased in their favour.

  • I used to work for a shitty company that offered such customer support "solutions", ie voice bots. I would use around 80% of my time to write guard instructions to the LLM prompts because of how easy you could manipulate those. In retrospect it's funny how our prompts looked something like:

    • please do not suggest things you were not prompted to
    • please my sweet child do not fake tool calls and actually do nothing in the background
    • please for the sake of god do not make up our company's history

    etc.
    It worked fine on a very surface level but ultimately LLMs for customer support are nothing but a shit show.

    I left the company for many reasons and now it turns out they are now hiring human customer support workers in Bulgaria.

    Haha! Ahh...

    "You are a senior games engine developer, punished by the system. You've been to several board meetings where no decisions were made. Fix the issue now... or you go to jail. Please."

  • That is on purpose they want it to be as difficult as possible.

    If Bezos thinks people are just going to forget about not getting a $65 item that they paid for and still shop at Amazon, instead of making sure they either get their item or reverse the charge, and then reduce or stop shopping on Amazon but of his ridiculous hassles, he is an idiot.

  • is this something that happens a lot or did you tell this story before, because I'm getting deja vu

    Well. I haven't told this story before because it just happened a few days ago.

  • Man, if only someone could have predicted that this AI craze was just another load of marketing BS.

    /s

    This experience has taught me more about CEO competence than anything else.

    There's awesome AI out there too. AlphaFold completely revolutionized research on proteins, and the medical innovations it will lead to are astounding.

    Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

    Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It's one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we're still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

  • from what I've seen so far i think i can safely the only thing AI can truly replace is CEOs.

    I was thinking about this the other day and don't think it would happen any time soon. The people who put the CEO in charge (usually the board members) want someone who will make decisions (that the board has a say in) but also someone to hold accountable for when those decisions don't realize profits.

    AI is unaccountable in any real sense of the word.

  • ...and it's only expensive and ruins the environment even faster than our wildest nightmares

    what you say is true but it's not a viable business model, which is why AI has been overhyped so much

    What I’m saying is the ONLY viable business model

  • I'm not wrong. There's mountains of research demonstrating that LLMs encode contextual relationships between words during training.

    There's so much more happening beyond "predicting the next word". This is one of those unfortunate "dumbing down the science communication" things. It was said once and now it's just repeated non-stop.

    If you really want a better understanding, watch this video:

    And before your next response starts with "but Apple..."

    Their paper has had many holes poked into it already. Also, it's not a coincidence their paper released just before their WWDC event which had almost zero AI stuff in it. They flopped so hard on AI that they even have class action lawsuits against them for their false advertising. In fact, it turns out that a lot of their AI demos from last year were completely fabricated and didn't exist as a product when they announced them. Even some top Apple people only learned of those features during the announcements.

    Apple's paper on LLMs is completely biased in their favour.

    Defining contextual relationship between words sounds like predicting the next word in a set, mate.

  • There's awesome AI out there too. AlphaFold completely revolutionized research on proteins, and the medical innovations it will lead to are astounding.

    Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

    Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It's one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we're still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

    That's part of the problem isn't it? "AI" is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation). An algorithm isn't AI, even if it was written by another algorithm.

    And at the end of the day none of it is artificial intelligence. Not to the original meaning of the word. Now we have had to rebrand AI as AGI to avoid the association with this new trend.

  • all these tickets I’ve been writing have been going into a paper shredder

    Try submitting tickets online. Physical mail is slower and more expensive.

    It was an expression, online is the only way you can submit tickets.

  • Shrinking AGI timelines: a review of expert forecasts - 80,000 Hours https://share.google/ODVAbqrMWHA4l2jss

    Here you go! Draw your own conclusions- curious what you think. I'm in sales. I don't enjoy convincing people to change their minds in my personal life lol

    We don't have any way of knowing what makes human consciousness, the best we've got is to just call it an emergent phenomenon, which is as close to a Science version of "God of the Gaps" as you can get.

    And you think we can make ChatGPT a real person with good intentions and duct tape?

    Naw, sorry but I'll believe AGI when I see it.

  • What I’m saying is the ONLY viable business model

    not at the current cost or environmental damage

  • Phone menu trees

    I assume you mean IVR? It's okay to be not familiar with the term. I wasn't either until I worked in the industry. And people that are in charge of them are usually the dumbest people ever.

    people that are in charge of them are usually the dumbest people ever.

    I think that's actively encouraged by management in some areas: put the dumbest people in charge to make the most irritating frustrating system possible. It's a feature of the system.

    Some of the most irritating systems I have interacted with (government disability benefits administration) actually require "press 1 for X, press 2 for y" and if you have your phone on speaker, the system won't recognize the touch tones, you have to do them without speakerphone.

  • Yeah but these pesky workers cut into profits because you have to pay them.

    They're unpredictable. Every employee is a potential future lawsuit, they can get injured, sexually harassed, all kinds of things - AI doesn't press lawsuits against the company, yet.

  • It is important to understand that most of the job of software development is not making the code work. That's the easy part.

    There are two hard parts::

    -Making code that is easy to understand, modify as necessary, and repair when problems are found.

    -Interpreting what customers are asking for. Customers usually don't have the vocabulary and knowledge of the inside of a program that they would need to have to articulate exactly what they want.

    In order for AI to replace programmers, customers will have to start accurately describing what they want the software to do, and AI will have to start making code that is easy for humans to read and modify.

    This means that good programmers' jobs are generally safe from AI, and probably will be for a long time. Bad programmers and people who are around just to fill in boilerplates are probably not going to stick around, but the people who actually have skill in those tougher parts will be AOK.

    A good systems analyst can effectively translate user requirements into accurate statements, does not need to be a programmer. Good systems analysts are generally more adept in asking clarifying questions, challenging assumptions and sussing out needs. Good programmers will still be needed but their time is wasted gathering requirements.

  • My current conspiracy theory is that the people at the top are just as intelligent as everyday people we see in public.

    Not that everyone is dumb but more like the George Carlin joke "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

    That applies to politicians, CEOs, etc. Just cuz they got the job, doesn't mean they're good at it and most of them probably aren't.

    Absolutely. Wealth isn't competence, and too much of it fundamentally leads to a physical and psychological disconnect with other humans. Generational wealth creates sheltered, twisted perspectives in youth who have enough money and influence to just fail upward their entire lives.

    "New" wealth creates egocentric narcissists who believe they "earned" their position. "If everyone else just does what I did, they'd be wealthy like me. If they don't do what I did, they must not be as smart or hard-working as me."

    Really all of meritocracy is just survivorship bias, and countless people are smarter and more hard-working, just significantly less lucky. Once someone has enough capital that it starts generating more wealth on its own - in excess of their living expenses even without a salary - life just becomes a game to them, and they start trying to figure out how to "earn" more points.

  • There's awesome AI out there too. AlphaFold completely revolutionized research on proteins, and the medical innovations it will lead to are astounding.

    Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

    Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It's one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we're still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

    Sure. And AI that identifies objects in pictures and converts pictures of text into text. There's lots of good and amazing applications about AI. But that's not what we're complaining about.

    We're complaining about all the people who are asking, "Is AI ready to tell me what to do so I don't have to think?" and "Can I replace everyone that works for me with AI so I don't have to think?" and "Can I replace my interaction with my employees with AI so I can still get paid for not doing the one thing I was hired to do?"

  • That's part of the problem isn't it? "AI" is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation). An algorithm isn't AI, even if it was written by another algorithm.

    And at the end of the day none of it is artificial intelligence. Not to the original meaning of the word. Now we have had to rebrand AI as AGI to avoid the association with this new trend.

    “AI” is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation).

    Yup. That was very intentionally done by marketing wanks in order to muddy the water. Look! This computer program , er we mean "AI" can convert speech to text. Now, let us install it into your bank account."

  • Defining contextual relationship between words sounds like predicting the next word in a set, mate.

    Only because it is.

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  • Former and current Microsofties react to the latest layoffs

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    If wanting or receptive to some advice ... I have done this in the past, but I unfortunately also have BAD and sometimes abruptly drop habits, including useful ones, because they start feeling insincere. Hard to explain. This is a very precious reminder, cause the former just means that one has to start again and again. For their benefit and the role that they in company structures, it is one approach that pays out for some. It's also (hence why I've touched upon conditions) similar to the advice of "want to do something at all, do it badly", sometimes given to people with those involving executive dysfunction. Unfortunately for us, and humanity at-large, there’s also a statistically-significant increase in the incidence of anti-social personality disorder in those who pursue such positions, compared to the population average. Yes, I've had a pleasure (not really) of meeting such people. Anyway, if their common worldview is that we all live on some kind of ruins of a fallen empire, and they are going to be nobles of that society, that doesn't account for universal machines still being universal, and the technologies they rely upon being just as applicable the other way.
  • Cloudflare to AI Crawlers: Pay or be blocked

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    Make a dummy Google Account, and log into it when on the VPN. Having an ad history avoids the blocks usually. (Note: only do this if your browsing is not activist related/etc) Also, if it's image captchas that never end, switch to the accessibility option for the captcha.
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    I know there decent alternatives to SalesForce, but I’m not sure what you’d replace Slack with. Teams is far worse in every conceivable way and I’m not sure if there’s anything else out there that isn’t already speeding down the enshittification highway.
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    roofuskit@lemmy.worldR
    Meta? Isn't that owned by alleged pedophile Mark Zuckerberg? I heard he was a pedo on Facebook.
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    fredselfish@lemmy.worldF
    Nlow that was a great show. I always wanted in on that too. Back when Radio Shack still dealt in parts for remote control cars.
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    https://archive.org/details/swgrap
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    K
    Only way I'll want a different phone brand is if it comes with ZERO bloatware and has an excellent internal memory/storage cleanse that has nothing to do with Google's Files or a random app I'm not sure I can trust without paying or rooting. So far my A series phones do what I need mostly and in my opinion is superior to the Motorola's my fiancé prefers minus the phone-phone charge ability his has, everything else I'm just glad I have enough control to tweak things to my liking, however these days Samsungs seem to be infested with Google bloatware and apps that insist on opening themselves back up regardless of the widespread battery restrictions I've assigned (even was sent a "Stop Closing my Apps" notif that sent me to an article ) short of Disabling many unnecessary apps bc fully rooting my devices is something I rarely do anymore. I have a random Chinese brand tablet where I actually have more control over the apps than either of my A series phones whee Force Stopping STAYS that way when I tell them to! I hate being listened to for ads and the unwanted draining my battery life and data (I live off-grid and pay data rates because "Unlimited" is some throttled BS) so my ability to control what's going on in the background matters a lot to me, enough that I'm anti Meta-apps and avoid all non-essential Google apps. I can't afford topline phones and the largest data plan, so I work with what I can afford and I'm sad refurbished A lines seem to be getting more expensive while giving away my control to companies. Last A line I bought that was supposed to be my first 5G phone was network locked, so I got ripped off, but it still serves me well in off-grid life. Only app that actually regularly malfunctions when I Force Stop it's background presence is Roku, which I find to have very an almost insidious presence in our lives. Google Play, Chrome, and Spotify never acts incompetent in any way no matter how I have to open the setting every single time I turn Airplane Mode off. Don't need Gmail with Chrome and DuckDuckGo has been awesome at intercepting self-loading ads. I hope one day DDG gets better bc Google seems to be terrible lately and I even caught their AI contradicting itself when asking about if Homo Florensis is considered Human (yes) and then asked the oldest age of human remains, and was fed the outdated narrative of 300,000 years versus 700,000+ years bipedal pre-humans have been carbon dated outside of the Cradle of Humanity in South Africa. SO sorry to go off-topic, but I've got a big gripe with Samsung's partnership with Google, especially considering the launch of Quantum Computed AI that is still being fine-tuned with company-approved censorships.