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Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

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Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#541

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Your post implies that these things don't apply outside of the west but I don't see how they don't equally apply everywhere. Also, is it abnormal that if you don't do work you can't eat? That seems like a pretty fundamental truth of life on earth.

Working to eat and improve one's own livelihood is great. The problem with our model is that most of the output of my work doesn't go to those things - it goes to some rich dude who's gonna keep shoving ads to my face and burning the planet I live in.

most of it?

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#542
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest

They don't use their own product, and they don't want their engineers to use their product either. They want velocity , and you can't have velocity if you're bogged down by doing end-to-end testing and finding friction and whatnot.

When they don't even want to try the thing, they are allegedly proud of, I would expect them to actually now, that the thing is garbage.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#543

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Oh fucking hell yes, how much I hate that shit. Bring back the "press 5 for XYZ" phone trees, I never have problems getting the systems to understand what I'm trying to indicate there.

I definitely prefer phone trees the ai agents. Something that has never made sense to me is why we even need most of the phone trees. Could they not just have separate numbers? Billing is X num. CS is Y num. Save the human species minutes for every fucking call. I realize the decision makers have been prioritizing the opposite. Making calls take as long as possible but I have no idea what is incentivizing them to do…

> Could they not just have separate numbers?

That's what they actually are, you just get an interactive type through for selecting your number. You can just type it all at once if you already know it.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#544
post #324

>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more. Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we wen…

What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest

>where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are

They don't care, since the sucker, sorry, the customer, keeps giving them his money

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't use their own product, and they don't want their engineers to use their product either. They want velocity , and you can't have velocity if you're bogged down by doing end-to-end testing and finding friction and whatnot.

When they don't even want to try the thing, they are allegedly proud of, I would expect them to actually now, that the thing is garbage.

They're proud of their quarterly results, not of the product, that they couldn't care less about.

They're not Steve Jobs types. They're glorified bean counters.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#546

>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more. Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we wen…

This generalization is false. As a customer I've seen good implementation of LLMs in products and liked it. I don't think they weŕe revolutionary but they filled gaps in the interface. Also the models, so fair, are trained to be useful, honest and to follow user instructions. Which is a breeze from the standard pattenrs.

You may think that it would be better to talk with a human than with a chatbot but the sad reality is that the humans working at customer support behave more like a bot than the LLMs do. YMMV but in most cases I'd rather talk to an LLM.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That mentality existed well before AI. See out-sourcing.

Out-sourcing does still involve humans, to be fair. If the premise is that "humans prefer human output" then outsourcing would still be preferred, even if it is preferred less.

I think I hate interacting more with a person who refuses to think and deviate from the prescribed script. I at least understand an AI bot is incapable of providing a different answer. The person refuses out of indifference.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#548

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LineageOS, GrapheneOS et al base themselves upon this upstream project. A good one to familiarize yourself with, and support.

Again, let me know when you see a LineageOS or GrapheneOS phone for sale on a store shelf. I am certainly familiar with these things. I just don't see them having a practical effect on the average consumer, just fellow HN commenting nerds. I think I have one friend in real life with GrapheneOS at the moment, and it is not an experience they would recommend to any other friend of mine. I support such things in theory,…

You don’t get root on GrapheneOS.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ever dreaded automated phone systems are more tolerable than the AI driven phone systems. The press 1 for... never tried to make you think someone was actually listening to you, yet the AI services are made to come across like you are talking to a human. Don't try to make people think it's a human.

> Don't try to make people think it's a human. Agreed. A local pizza place (Tribute Pizza) switched its phone over to an AI assistant that goes out of its way to appear human to such a degree that it inserts random "restaurant bustle" sound effects into the call so it sounds like you're talking to someone standing in a crowded restaurant. The subterfuge of layering in sound effects to make idiots think they were stil…

Interesting, this reminds me a bit of TTS models that had poor quality training data inserting commercial jingles or background music into their output, although I would agree that in this case it sounds intentional.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, AI customer service agents can be really helpful for some things, but when they aren’t helpful they are the most annoying thing in the world. I think this leads to a problem because leadership might see metrics showing that the AI service agent successfully helped with 80% of the questions it is asked, but they don’t realize how damaging that 20% is. Over time, more and more of your customer base is…

My analogy for this sort of thing is always sand in the lettuce. It's amazing how easily you can ruin lettuce if it just occasionally crunches against your teeth in that particular way: you start dreading the sensation. You can't see it coming, it's not constant, but it's horrible.

Ugh thanks, I can feel this in my teeth right now
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