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Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

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Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#141
post #107
post #10

> What he didn't know at the time is there is no phone number for Facebook customer support. Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers. They don't even have a real number to play a recorded message affirming that there is no ability to call. ETA: For instance, I notice Facebook appears to own th…

>Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers. Frankly it's absurd to me that it's legal to do so. Any public facing company that is sufficiently large should be required by law to operate a phone service where you can talk to a real human being. All of these huge mega corps are run with absolute i…

For some cases, your local small claims court may be an efficient escalation path. If enough people do it, companies will learn that too much stonewalling doesn't actually save money, because now your customer support is done by the legal department.

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, headline is overly broad by just saying 'AI'. From just the headline itself, it'd be easy to write this off as "duh, this guy's a fool", but the AI in question here is from Meta, itself. And, not only is it from Meta, but it's the AI they've put in charge of support.

> And, not only is it from Meta, but it's the AI they've put in charge of support. Does it say that in the article or somewhere else? I didn’t see that in the article.

You can see it in the screenshots.

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And, not only is it from Meta, but it's the AI they've put in charge of support. Does it say that in the article or somewhere else? I didn’t see that in the article.

You can see it in the screenshots.

It says “Meta AI”, but I don’t see an indicator that it’s labeled as providing support. On my device, it doesn’t say so, and is labeled as possibly “inaccurate or inappropriate “. (It still provides a bogus phone number.)

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you feel the need to arbitrarily ascribe some ideology to random people based on one comment? I'm not "techno-utopian" in any sense of the word; I believe that the current AI development is highly risky and that we need to take careful measures such that society at large is prepared for the changes it may bring. The "wide range of opinions" I see on HN are largely misinformed: they either lack the necessary te…

Yeah, it's true. I asked my grocery checker how an LLM works, and she rolled her eyes and said, "Come on, Chipotle, they're lexical analysis systems that operates by performing vector math operations on points in a vast multidimensional space that represent tokenized subwords, everyone can immediately intuit that based on the sixty-second cheerleading news clips they saw on CBS. What do you think I am, a Hacker News…

" > you are a clerk at a local grocery store... "

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bad thing is that people still think LLMs can be trusted at all . Companies integrating them into their offerings are not helping the public adopt the correct mental framing of these tools as "plausible text generators".

This can be solved with more data. New tech like Windows Recall should be able to scrape enough of the world's data so that this sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.

a) There is no evidence that it can be solved with more data.

b) Windows Recall data is never going to make its way into public models.

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. Sure, humans can lie or get things wrong. But normal people will also admit when they don't know something. LLMs tend not to admit when they don't know something, and they use an authoritative voice that sounds like they know what they're talking about. To an untrained person, this can easily be misleading.

> But normal people will also admit when they don't know something. You'd like to think so, right? However, this isn't really a solid thesis. Decent people will admit when they don't know. Is that normal? I've worked with so many people that just do not fit that definition at all, to the point it just seems like that's the normal way to behave. Maybe I'm jaded grossly overweighting it, but it just seems I have been i…

> However, this isn't really a solid thesis

Let's get 1000 random people in a surgery room and ask them to perform brain surgery.

You actually think that most of them will say "sure I know exactly how to do this".

Be serious.

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#147
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s untenable from a marketing perspective to advertise a phone line that just talks about the services you don’t offer. One could maybe hope for a statement on a help page that says “Facebook will never ask you to call a support number”.

I think what you've gotta do is say, "You can't call, but here is the number anyway," because customers aren't necessarily interacting with your page anymore. They're interacting with AI summaries of your page. Those AIs might be in house, or might be provided by a search engine. What is tenable or untenable will have to shift to the realities of how users are interacting with the information you present. If you can'…

I like how we've suddenly accepted "AI" "summaries" as simply the way of the future, despite the inherent problems and repeatedly botched rollouts.

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be solved with more data. New tech like Windows Recall should be able to scrape enough of the world's data so that this sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.

a) There is no evidence that it can be solved with more data. b) Windows Recall data is never going to make its way into public models.

> b) Windows Recall data is never going to make its way into public models.

It doesn't need to. It just needs to make its way into OpenAI's models, which it will.

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#149

This reminds me of the time I reported a fake PayPal email saying my account had been suspended to PayPal. The woman who answered the phone for PayPal told me very emphatically that I HAD BETTER HURRY UP AND DO EVERYTHING THEY TOLD ME TO!

My bank's phone reps have repeatedly asked for the 6-digit 2FA code that comes in a text saying WE WILL NEVER ASK FOR THIS CODE OVER THE PHONE.

Their answer to me is "but you called us", which is fair, but they could just rephrase the message to "WE WILL NEVER CONTACT YOU TO ASK FOR THIS CODE"

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#150
post #147
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what you've gotta do is say, "You can't call, but here is the number anyway," because customers aren't necessarily interacting with your page anymore. They're interacting with AI summaries of your page. Those AIs might be in house, or might be provided by a search engine. What is tenable or untenable will have to shift to the realities of how users are interacting with the information you present. If you can'…

I like how we've suddenly accepted "AI" "summaries" as simply the way of the future, despite the inherent problems and repeatedly botched rollouts.

It could be rejected for sure. I personally don't think it's working well. I don't support it really.
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