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Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

mindmatters.ai

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Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#11

Post by nyfresh »

The expectation seems a little harsh for the setup. GPT just generates acceptable text. You still need to model and verify object relationships, use facts from a knowledge base and discriminate the generated responses at the very minimum.

Any GPT model is just one component inside of a chatbot, not a chatbot itself.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#12

Post by klyrs »

My favourite flaw of chatbots is exposed by ELIZA. Not chatting with ELIZA, (though, it does suffer this flaw) but using responses inspired by that program.

"Please elaborate on that" or "tell me more about [noun]" etc. Bots appear to have zero lines of short term memory, and utterly fail to pick up a reference to the thing that they just said. My favorite being

   bot> [something plausibly human-sounding]

   me> What do you mean by [noun in previous sentence]

   bot> why are you calling me mean?  That really hurts my feelings
It has been a few years, and I feel like a smart bot-writer might be able to leverage something like GPT3 to at least include a little bit more of the current transcript into the prompt to at least superficially address this gaping flaw. Have they?

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#13

Post by pwinnski »

Having worked in ML at two different companies now, I think that people interpreting model output as intelligence or understanding says much more about the people than about the model output.

We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true.

But it isn't. It's math and tricks, and if human intelligence is truly nothing more than math and tricks, then what we have today is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the amount of math and tricks in the average human brain, because what we have today isn't anywhere close.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#14

Post by makeitdouble »

arthur_sav wrote: post #5

I really hate when companies hide behind chatbots. Like, NOOOO, your "AI" chatbot didn't help me - get me an actual person.

Except the alternative is rarely the actual person you need.

Before chatbots it was endless phone trees. Before phone trees it was oversea operators rerouting you around departments. Before that it was unpaid interns putting you on hold until you get disconnected or give up.

The game has always be to make it as hard as possible to reach the most costly level of support.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#15

Post by [deleted] »

benbristow wrote: post #9
arthur_sav wrote: post #5

I really hate when companies hide behind chatbots. Like, NOOOO, your "AI" chatbot didn't help me - get me an actual person.

It can be quite useful in a weird way. While everyone else is stuck on the chatbot going round in circles, usually typing something like "human" or "talk to human" will make the chatbot connect you with an actual human representative (or ask you a few basic questions first and then connect you). I've used the trick on various large company's websites when trying to get support and it seems to be quite 'universal'.

[deleted]

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#16

Post by the_only_law »

arthur_sav wrote: post #5

I really hate when companies hide behind chatbots. Like, NOOOO, your "AI" chatbot didn't help me - get me an actual person.

Still doesn’t piss me off as much as automated phone support systems.

90% of the time they only offer options that I could easily go online to do. If I’m calling your phone number. It’s because I have a problem that’s not solved or clarified by your existing self-support systems.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#17

Post by codegeek »

arthur_sav wrote: post #5

I really hate when companies hide behind chatbots. Like, NOOOO, your "AI" chatbot didn't help me - get me an actual person.

We have a chatbot on our marketing site but it says something like "I am a Bot. Once I ask you a couple of questions, I can connect you to a human. Is that ok ?".

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#18

Post by kapp_in_life »

the_only_law wrote: post #16
arthur_sav wrote: post #5

I really hate when companies hide behind chatbots. Like, NOOOO, your "AI" chatbot didn't help me - get me an actual person.

Still doesn’t piss me off as much as automated phone support systems. 90% of the time they only offer options that I could easily go online to do. If I’m calling your phone number. It’s because I have a problem that’s not solved or clarified by your existing self-support systems.

Unfortunately I think they've found that most people don't(won't?) do that self debugging.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/806/

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#19

Post by detaro »

api wrote: post #8
ramesh31 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yet another Next Big Thing that I was right about predicting would fail. I was hired at my current company 4 years ago to work on our chatbot client. Despite years of engineering effort put into an NLP based decision tree system, over 90% of chats were still falling back to a live agent. They just recently sunsetted the product for lack of interest. Thank god that fad is over. Web design trends come and go, but that…

I got the impression the entire thing was pushed by Slack probably by way of some PR firm. I utterly despise how mindlessly faddish this field is. For a field supposedly so full of smart people who often pride themselves on being "contrarian" (sometimes to a fault), people sure do bleat like sheep when the next fad comes along.

Not sure, but the Slack things are more the "chat as commandline UI" with fixed commands and such, not the kind of bots discussed here that suggest you can actually talk to them, aren't they?
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