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.

The good thing: half of them have come to their senses.

The bad thing: half of them haven't.

I called the local HVAC company and they had an AI rep. The thing literally couldn't even schedule an appointment and I couldn't get it to transfer me to a human. I called someone else. They never even called me back so they probably don't even know they lost my business.

And one funny addendum to that story is that someone COULD reasonably think that Pepsi had an actual Harrier to give away. After all, Pepsi once owned an actual navy.

PepsiCo - Wikipedia

(en.m.wikipedia.org)

In 1989, amidst declining vodka sales, PepsiCo bartered for 2 new Soviet oil tankers, 17 decommissioned submarines (for $150,000 each), a frigate, a cruiser and a destroyer, which they could in turn sell for non-Soviet currency. The oil tankers were leased out through a Norwegian company, while the other ships were immediately sold for scrap.

The Harrier commercial aired in 1996. The Harrier jet was introduced in 1978. It wasn’t too unreasonable to think that an 18 year old jet aircraft would be decommissioned and sold, especially after Soviet tensions eased. And if ‘they’ let Pepsi own actual submarines and a destroyer, doesn’t that seem more far fetched than owning a single old jet aircraft?

Guy should’ve gotten his Harrier.

I've never used Twitter and do not plan to. That doesn't mean that everyone else has to stop using it because I don't approve of it.

Well yeah, the reason you don't approve of it matters. If you never approved of it because you never liked the UX, then that's not a good reason for everyone to stop using it.

When we minimize other reasons to "words you don't like", we imply an unimportant personal preference, and not a social choice with consequences for others.

...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

This isn't a surprise to anyone except fucking idiots who can't tell the difference between actual technology and bullshit peddlers.

Fun fact: AI doesn't know what is or isn't true. They only know what is most likely to seem true. You can't make it stop lying. You just can't, because it fundamentally doesn't understand the difference between a lie and truth.

Now picture the people saying "We can replace our trainable, knowledgeable people with this". lol ok.

I have been part of a mass tech leadership exodus at a company where the CEO wants everything to be AI. They have lost 5 out of 8 of their director/VP/Exec leaders in the last 3 months, not to mention all the actual talent abandoning ship.

The CEO really believes that all of his pesky employees who he hates will be full replaced by cheap AI agents this year. He's going to be lucky to continue to keep processing orders in a few months the way it's going. He should be panicked, but I think instead he's doing a lot of coke.

Which honestly seems to be an overwhelming majority of people.

Tech companies took a pretty good predictive text mechanism and called it "intelligent" when it obviously isn't. People believed the hype, so greedy capitalists went all in on a cheaper alternative to their human workers. They deserve to lose business over their stupid mistakes.

Its funny (and terrifying) that people, even professionals don't understand how the lie machine works.

But we need to fail faster, and be agile into the cloud!

Seems like it's cheaper and more efficient just to pay people to fuck on camera.

Thank fucking christ. Now hopefully the AI bubble will burst along with it and I don't have to listen to techbros drone on about how it's going to replace everything which is definitely something you do not want to happen in a world where we sell our ability to work in exchange for money, goods and services.

Hopefully that half will go out of business.

And discord. For fucks sake I hate when a project has replaced a forum with discord. They are not the same thing.

So providing NO assistance to customers turned out to be a bad idea?

THE MOST UNPREDICTABLE OUTCOME IN THE HISTORY OF CUSTOMER SERVICE!

Lol absence of feces?

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.