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Don't make me talk to your chatbot

raymyers.org

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Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#191

Post by Jiro »

lifis wrote: post #84
com2kid wrote: post #13

People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…

Why not charge for support? And if it turns out to be your mistake (faulty product or missing documentation) as opposed to something the user could have reasonably solved by themselves, refund the charge and possibly provide compensation for the inconvenience.

Because if you charge for support but refund it if it's the company's fault, the company now has a big financial incentive to never admit it's their fault.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#192

Post by onetokeoverthe »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #95
com2kid wrote: post #13

People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…

> Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. My brother used to work at tech support for XBox Live. He said that 80% of his calls were for password resets, something users can easily self-service. There's literally an option on the login form for "Forgot Password", and people would rather spend time ca…

[dead]

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#193

Post by redox99 »

chimeracoder wrote: post #112
redox99 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware. If they want to reduce support calls, then have more reliable gear.

> Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware. I'm sympathetic to the argument that companies should make support calls less necessary by providing better products and services, but "just write bug-free software" is not a solution.

You're implying all software/hardware is of equal quality. I've had many routers with years of uptime, never requiring a reboot.

And I'm sure they had a lot of bugs, but not every bug means hanging to the point of requiring a reboot during normal operation.

Even a proper watchdog would, after some downtime, recover the system.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#194

Post by ares623 »

patrickmay wrote: post #54
ares623 wrote: post #14

Day by day i'm starting to lean towards this take https://anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/haterdom/2025/08/2...

I regret that I have but one upvote to give to this comment.

You can share it whenever the appropriate comment chain comes up.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#195

Post by foxglacier »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #95
com2kid wrote: post #13

People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…

> Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. My brother used to work at tech support for XBox Live. He said that 80% of his calls were for password resets, something users can easily self-service. There's literally an option on the login form for "Forgot Password", and people would rather spend time ca…

It takes less brainpower to talk to a person. I often just call companies instead of trying to fight through their stupid FAQs and websites and all that crap. No I'm not going to install your stupid app just to do one thing once ever. I don't want to learn anything or remember anything. We're at a stage in technology where there's no excuse for crap software in simple devices.

Recently the ventilation fan in my house wasn't measuring temperature correctly so I called the company. Their tech came round, got me to enter my wifi password, updated the firmware, and viola - it started working properly. I'm sure they had a FAQ or manual explaining that but I'm not wasting my mental energy on such rubbish.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#196

Post by Ajakks »

sfink wrote: post #138
Ajakks wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You act as if the internet was like a high society book club - all the previous articles were written by ivy league grads. I recall geocities, angelfire, all the chans. The internet has always been a cesspool with little islands of quality floating in a proverbial sewage of human output. In theory AI slop will improve. A racist, sexist, ignorant online community of humans 20 years ago, if it is still active, is almos…

Being able to name especially egregious forums is the point. AI slop isn't worse than preceding slop, but it is more widespread, partly because it's more socially acceptable than racism, sexism, and ignorance, and partly because it's harder to identify. Similarly, email spam that is easy to automatically categorize is not a problem. Making slop less sloppy makes the problem worse, not better. You could claim that tha…

I am making no claims about slop - I think that saying, "AI slop is going to ruin the internet" is something that itself requires further clarification.

I'm assuming you are advocating for AI to "go away" or be banned or something of that nature - that is most definitely not a valid argument.

AI doesnt do anything. People set the AI on a task. People have every right to ruin the internet however they see fit (within legal realms) and I dont even think you are actually upset about the actually more "unleashed AI" that post comments and participate in chats with specific agenda - you are annoyed with the websites that are mostly AI content...

The AI didnt make the website, select the topic prompt, and paste that onto the page -> a person did that. Your actually upset at people for not posting content up to your standards - which people have been saying the entire time the internet has been a public thing.

I honestly do not understand what part of this whole process, and AI content in general, appears so empowering for this.

Your argument is essentially akin to "people don't kill people, guns do" and all artuments framed this way, operate under an assumption that they are like some arbitor of quality - and simply by stating "AI Slop" it makes it so.

All of this is nonsense.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#197

Post by Ajakks »

WD-42 wrote: post #122
Ajakks wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You act as if the internet was like a high society book club - all the previous articles were written by ivy league grads. I recall geocities, angelfire, all the chans. The internet has always been a cesspool with little islands of quality floating in a proverbial sewage of human output. In theory AI slop will improve. A racist, sexist, ignorant online community of humans 20 years ago, if it is still active, is almos…

So your straw man is that the internet already had bad stuff on it? Cmon, you can do better. Adding more bad to bad is still bad.

Where did I strawman?

And might be the 1st time in my life that I was strawmanned, with an accusation of pulling a strawman - thats pretty fantastic actually, I'll give you that.

Otherwise I wrote a book on the other comment on this - you should check that out.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#198

Post by gizmo686 »

chimeracoder wrote: post #112
redox99 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware. If they want to reduce support calls, then have more reliable gear.

> Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware. I'm sympathetic to the argument that companies should make support calls less necessary by providing better products and services, but "just write bug-free software" is not a solution.

This isn't a case where you need bug free software. This is a case where the frequency of fatal bugs is directly proportional to the support cost. Fix the common bugs, then write off the support for rare ones as a cost of doing business.

The effect of cheap robo support is not reducing the cost of support. It is reducing the cost of development by enabling a more buggy product while maintaining the previous support costs.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#199

Post by hatthew »

charcircuit wrote: post #188
hatthew wrote: post #97

Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You…

It's not possible to directly transfer 300 bits of information as that would require a form of telepathy. If it takes 1000 bits of English to distribute something that represents your idea properly it is useful to have a tool to create those 1000s bits instead of doing it manually character by character.

Sorry I wasn't very clear. TFA is talking about using LLMs to write things from scratch, not just to clean up grammar for example. In that context, I was talking about bits of semantic information, not bits of English text information. You might have 300 bits of semantic information in your mind, and then you have to expand that to, say, 600 bits of English text to give to the LLM. If you're using the LLM purely to turn bullet points into prose, it'll add more bits of English, but not more bits of (useful) semantic information.

I prompted Claude with "(information theory) difference between semantic information and english text information in the context of using LLMs for writing": https://claude.ai/share/5925245a-0893-46ba-bca9-30627d4facbc

If you're familiar with LLMs and information theory, the LLM isn't giving you any semantic information that you don't already know. If you aren't familiar with LLMs and information theory, you can learn about them from google and/or your own LLM, using that prompt for keywords. In either case, the LLM's response isn't very helpful, because it's not my ideas that you are reading, it's random information pulled from the internet (directly or indirectly), and it's not actually the semantic information I wanted to convey.

This comment is more useful than the LLM's, because every word is chosen to convey the ideas in my mind as clearly as possible in the context of this article and conversation. It's also half as many words to read.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#200

Post by onion2k »

WD-42 wrote: post #36
onion2k wrote: post #18

There's been a lot of "the world doesn't work the way I want it to" on HN recently. I suspect this is a function of an aging readership more than anything particularly groundbreaking about hot takes on the up and coming tech. "Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." Douglas Adams

Do you enjoy reading slop? I fail to see how this is a controversial take.

Honestly, I'm not good enough at distinguishing between AI and human-written content to know. I don't want to read 'bad writing' for sure, but that's rules out a lot more than AI. I also believe that the human (hopefully) reading and accepting the output of AI before putting it on the internet is more responsible for 'AI slop' more than the AI is, because the human-side author should be checking what they publish, so I don't really need to know. If I read someone's post and don't like it I won't go back to their blog again. If I read it and I do like it, I will go back. Whether or not they're using AI is essentially irrelevant to me.

Fortunately for us all HN does that curation for us. High quality blog posts from well-written and interesting blogs like simonw's posts get posted here a lot. I can't tell if he uses AI to help write them but given his deep work on AI topics I'd be surprised if he doesn't.

Plus, I strongly suspect that AI content is improving at a pace that means most people won't be able to tell in a few years, especially once tools to easily fine tune a model on a corpus of your own text are simple to use.

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