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The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

aphyr.com

11–20 of 177 posts

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#11
> Since LLMs are unpredictable and vulnerable to injection attacks, customer service machines must also have limited power

Haha yes. I interacted with a bank one. It was like press 5 for mortgages but with a text to speech front end.

At the end of the day the LLM can be tricked into doing anything.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#14
post #5

So basically more ways of trying to make people buy things, do things, think things than before? I feel like our whole world more and more circulates around manipulation and the absence of truth and discourse. Then again, I do think LLMs are an incredible technological achievement. The issue is not so much what they do or that they exist, but how they are utilized. Right now, they are utilized to further the class di…

Self inflating nipple shaped balloons that generate their own lift without any helium would be an incredible achievement but that doesn't mean it's useful beyond being novel. Chatbots are ultimately just predictive text on steroids, and only complete fools would base their business, or entire economy around it.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#15

This is doomerism. Yes, everything will get worse. But everything will also get better. Such is progress. (for every one of these examples of annoyances, I can think of two ways to use AI to get around the annoyance. not clever programmer things, but things an average person who learns to use Codex or Claude Desktop to operate their desktop will know) Most of these annoyances are also things that existed before AI, a…

>(for every one of these examples of annoyances, I can think of two ways to use AI to get around the annoyance. not clever programmer things, but things an average person who learns to use Codex or Claude Desktop to operate their desktop will know)

As the author said:

>I suspect that like the job market, everyone will wind up paying massive “AI” companies to manage the drudgery they created.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#16
Regarding companies trying to block any contact with customer service and adding endless AI hurdles: In some countries, having a reachable means of contact is legally required. Is there a NOYB-style organization that specializes in enforcing this right (suing companies on behalf of consumers)?

For the "bureaucracy has royally fucked up and doesn't want to fix it", if it is something that can be fixed with money and isn't time sensitive (e.g. you need a refund rather than get the airline to actually provide you the ticket you already paid for and want to fly this weekend): In countries that have effective small claims courts, these can be a surprisingly convenient (less hassle than the "talk to the bot" wall of the company!) to resolve this kind of issue.

I hope that these resolution methods become more common - I think the tools to fight enshittification often already exist, we just don't use them enough. A welcome side effect would, of course, be that this would impose a real cost on the enshittifiers, creating an incentive to provide proper support.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#17

> ML models will hurt innocent people. Lots of blaming LLMs but I think the root cause lies elsewhere, I’m not even sure whether dismissing it as “capitalism” or “profit motives” would do it justice, because in general it feels more like the world that we live in lacks humanity . Even in a capitalist world, a company could take a stance and decide not to purposefully screw people over, but in the world that we live i…

In a capitalist world, the company that does decide to screw people over gets rich and the one that doesn't goes out of business.

It would be great if people chose not to do business with the former, but many simply do not care. They may think only other people get screwed. They may not take the time to think about it, especially if the company spends a ton of money obfuscating their misbehavior. Quite a few actively defend the right of companies to screw them.

Technology multiplies that like a lever. We weren't prepared for capitalism before LLMs and we're massively under-prepared now.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#18

> ML models will hurt innocent people. Lots of blaming LLMs but I think the root cause lies elsewhere, I’m not even sure whether dismissing it as “capitalism” or “profit motives” would do it justice, because in general it feels more like the world that we live in lacks humanity . Even in a capitalist world, a company could take a stance and decide not to purposefully screw people over, but in the world that we live i…

A lot of this has been going on for a long time and I've been sensitive to it. LLMs may not be solely responsible but they're a massive escalation.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#19
have worked closely with customer support teams, can confirm that the goal of any technical improvements that go in front of CS agents is to reduce ticket volume, and thus costs. of course they measure retention and satisfaction but ticket volume is always the big one. chatbots were big for this long before LLMs existed.

a fun side effect is that CS is also an early warning system for companies, so when you make it harder to get through to a human, you start throwing out info on your users' pain points. of course this only matters if people have a choice about whether to use your product, so that's gotta be an upside for insurance companies, etc.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#20
I don't need to conduct 1000 transactions per day. I don't forsee a world in which it will be some sort of fatal inconvenience to need to approve all purchases. I certainly don't plan on ever just handing over my credit card to an LLM, due to its fundamental architectural issues with injection, and I still don't anticipate handing it over to any future AI architecture anytime soon because I struggle to imagine what benefits could possibly be worth the risk of taking down such a basic, cheap barrier.

All that stuff about support, though, inevitable.

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