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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

#21

Post by metalliqaz »

pizzathyme wrote: post #15

The key thing here is not whether it's AI. The key thing is quality and signal. No one wants to read to a low quality human comment either. If the AI output was actually better than talking to a real human, more useful, more concise, serving the job to be done, then no one would have a problem with it. In fact they would appreciate it. That future is not here in many areas. The problem is people are wielding AI right…

No it isn't. I really do not care what the LLM has to say. If a person has taken the (substantial) time necessary to fill the context with enough information that something interesting comes out, I would much rather they simply give me the inputs. The middleman is just digested Internet text. I've already got one of those on my end.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#23

Post by bwat49 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #17
tombert wrote: post #9

I guess part of the advantage of being an extremely long-winded writer who makes lots of typos is that people know that what I'm writing is probably written by a human. Though maybe people will start supplying context like "no em dashes, and occasionally misspell a word or two", and soon you won't even be able to tell that.

Typos and EM-dashes are not just obvious. They are avoidable. Here's the kicker: Even if you remove those, other AI smells don't just exist. They are obvious.

Yeah a trend that I've noticed in online comments is people taking LLM generated text and just removing punctuation and making it all lowercase. It's like dude, it's still so obvious xD

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#24

Post by morkalork »

titanomachy wrote: post #5
Molitor5901 wrote: post #2

Related: Please don't make me talk to your AI pretend-human complete with Asian accent and background call center sounds. That's even more insulting that a chat bot.

Who did this?

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/retell-ai

The different accents and call center background noise are features in their product.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#25

Post by TimFogarty »

I have noticed that my writing ability has atrophied since I was writing essays in school. Now at work most of my writing is slack messages. Writing longer more thoughtful pieces about strategy or performance review has become a slog. I suspect that a lot of people have had a similar experience so offloading the pain of writing to an LLM is appealing.

But frankly LLMs suck at writing. It's not only formulaic, it's uninspired!! So I worry that we're entering an era of mediocre writing. I like the "Have you considered writing?" suggestion. I've been trying to make a habit of writing book reviews so I can counter some of the writing atrophy I've developed. Hopefully it will help me become a better thinker too. As Ray says here: "Understanding your own point of view is an enriching exercise."

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#26

Post by schrectacular »

pizzathyme wrote: post #15

The key thing here is not whether it's AI. The key thing is quality and signal. No one wants to read to a low quality human comment either. If the AI output was actually better than talking to a real human, more useful, more concise, serving the job to be done, then no one would have a problem with it. In fact they would appreciate it. That future is not here in many areas. The problem is people are wielding AI right…

Slop-y indeed

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#27

Post by anonymous_sorry »

ericd wrote: post #6
kokanee wrote: post #3

I view the issue of inefficient communication as a problem that will wane as LLMs progress, and a bit idealistic about the efficiency of most human-to-human communication. I feel strongly that we shouldn't be forced to interact with chatbots for a much simpler reason: it's rude. It's dismissive of the time and attention of the person on the other end; it demonstrates laziness or an inability to succeed without cuttin…

I feel like that ship sailed long ago with phone trees and hour-long support wait times becoming normal. Not that it's an ideal state of affairs, but I'd much rather talk to a chatbot than wait for an hour for a human who doesn't want to talk to anyone, as long as that chatbot is empowered to solve my problem.

Have you ever had a chatbot solve your problem? I don't think this has ever happened to me.

As a reasonably technical user capable of using search, the only way this could really happen is if there was no web/app interface for something I wanted to do, but there was a chatbot/AI interface for it.

Perhaps companies will decide to go chatbot-first for these things, and perhaps customers will prefer that. But I doubt it to be honest - do people really want to use a fuzzy-logic CLI instead of a graphical interface? If not, why won't companies just get AI to implement the functionality in their other UIs?

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#28

Post by SaberTail »

The "figure out what you want to say" is key. I've started to think of LLMs, at least in a business setting, as misunderstanding amplifiers.

How many times at work have you been talking to someone else where they're using common words as jargon? Maybe it's something like "the online system" or "the platform". And it's perfectly clear to them what they mean, but everyone else in the company either doesn't know what that actually is, or they have a distorted idea based on the conventional definitions of the words. Even without LLMs in the mix, this can lead to people coming out of meetings with completely different understandings of what's going on.

My experience is few people are actually providing the relevant context to the LLM to explain what they mean in situations like this. Or they don't have the actual knowledge and are using the LLM in the hopes it'll fill in for their ignorance. The LLMs are RLHFed to sound confident, so they won't convey that they don't know what a piece of jargon means. Instead they'll use a combination of the common meaning and the rest of the context to invent something. When this gets copy/pasted and sent around, it causes everyone who isn't familiar to get the wrong idea. Hence "misunderstanding amplifier".

To the point of the article, this is soluble if people take the time to actually figure out what they are trying to convey. But if they did that, they wouldn't need the LLM in the first place.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#29

Post by WD-42 »

pizzathyme wrote: post #15

The key thing here is not whether it's AI. The key thing is quality and signal. No one wants to read to a low quality human comment either. If the AI output was actually better than talking to a real human, more useful, more concise, serving the job to be done, then no one would have a problem with it. In fact they would appreciate it. That future is not here in many areas. The problem is people are wielding AI right…

No. It doesn’t matter how good an llm model is. If a person has something to say and they can give the llm enough context to say it well, they should just write it themselves. Theres 0 reason to bring a llm into it. Doing so simply makes your writing less trustworthy because as a reader I don’t know if what I’m reading is genuine from the writer or simply average of all texts filler.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#30

Post by aprentic »

People want to spend as little as possible while getting support for their product as long as possible.

Companies want people to spend as much as possible while doing the minimum work on the product.

Chatbots let companies spend almost nothing while pretending to provide long-term support.

I wonder if something similar to a copyleft license could help. What if there was a contractual "fair business" pledge that companies could add? I imagine that good enough lawyers could craft something that essentially said, "You can only display this contract if you legally guarantee that you do X, Y, Z and do not do A, B C."

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