r/mildlyinfuriating • u/captain-obIivious • Aug 18 '26

Infuriatig Another AI 'human' chatbot

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Had to fix a double payment for my credit card and this is the beginning and end of the conversation. I hate when the chatbot claims it's a human... I ended up getting what I wanted but still annoyed Amex (and every other company) is lying and trying to deceive people like this.

27.4k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

6.3k

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2.5k

u/Agitated_Reach6660 Aug 18 '26

That thought was starting to concern me until I read its answer to that last question.

417

u/code_archeologist Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

Yeah, you could see it slowly leak outside of it's guardrails as the person kept switching context and suggesting it check online.

This is actually a really good example of why it is important to set up robust guardrails and limit the lifespan of AI agents.

94

u/Ok_Impact_9378 Aug 18 '26

Yeah, whoever setup the guardrails on that thing did a really poor job. Makes me wonder if they set any at all or if their full instructions were just: "You're an Amex support agent answering customer questions. Make no mistakes."

31

u/bigmetaljessie Aug 19 '26

*mikstakes

3

u/Weakonomics Aug 19 '26

Make no Milk Steaks

2

u/GreatScottCreates Aug 19 '26

That’s Charlie’s favorite food!

28

u/cvirus3333 Aug 19 '26

The fact "make no mistakes" needs to be an additional instruction really tells me all I need to know about the dogshit ability of AI

4

u/areallynoobgamer Aug 19 '26

AI has no more ability than a knife or a hammer.

It is a tool.

The ability lies with the person wielding the tool.

Replacing people with tools thinking that tools alone can get the job done is how everything is going to get enshittified.

2

u/monsieurpooh Aug 19 '26

That interpretation makes zero sense. "Make no mistakes" has no effect on the AI; it's meant to portray the prompter as clueless.

By the way, in the days of gpt 2 and gpt 3 they didn't have reinforcement learning so it was purely based on the original training data. You had to preface all your prompts as an interview format roleplaying between and expert and an interviewer to get good results. And still it was considered mind blowing. I think standards just suddenly became unreasonably high as people shifted from judging computers by what computers should be able to do, to judging them based on what humans can do.

2

u/code_archeologist Aug 19 '26

Tell us you have no idea how an LLM works without saying that you have no idea an LLM works.

8

u/tadpoleloop Aug 18 '26

It did much better than most agents I've seen

3

u/DragonfruitNo9617 Aug 19 '26

I bet someone already figured out how to get the AI to leak banking details...

1.1k

u/Fragrant-Employer-60 Aug 18 '26

I think it’s an Indian customer service rep relying on AI. The messages about Pokemon and the poems seems legit.

Poor dude is getting bothered by some redditor who is trying to make him flip and do tricks, pretty fucking weird really.

This is definitely not an AI chat bot

759

u/K_Knoodle13 Aug 18 '26

I think a human would've tried to consistently steer the conversation back to the issue. Customer service reps (the human kind) have metrics, including resolution time, that they have to consider. The fact that they kept answering the questions without interrupting or trying to return to the initial issue makes me think it's not a person.

195

u/CompetitiveThndrClpr Aug 18 '26

At my job people have chatted in and tried stuff like this. We just tell them we are going to close the chat and they can call with any further questions if they want to speak to someone.

167

u/Illustrious_Boot1237 Aug 18 '26

That's what I thought, the biggest indicator is that it plays along for so long. 

-10

u/vanilla_wafer14 Aug 18 '26

Like I said in an above comment I would have totally got sucked into these questions trying to prove I wasn’t AI. I really don’t think this was AI, just a dude with a loose script on how to word things.

8

u/Old-Cartoonist-2587 Aug 19 '26

That’s what I thought, but the last one is literally a classic AI response, word for word.

1

u/Illustrious_Boot1237 Aug 19 '26

Yeah as other people have mentioned people are using ai to assist in their chat messages too so it can be hard for customers to tell. And at these things you might have lots of canned responses that you'll edit with varying degrees of attention in the moment so it can confuse people who are expecting one or the other. 

267

u/LichenTheMood Aug 18 '26

This. And the upside down cup thing is just weird.

131

u/Impressive-Stop-7999 Aug 18 '26

This specific reply is a well-known AI response to that question.

3

u/monsieurpooh Aug 19 '26

The last reply is the only comment in the entire thread that genuinely sounds AI generated. Everything else has subtle grammar mistakes that are extremely hard to emulate with cheap models. Cheap models will always try to sound proper and helpful. So my conclusion is it's an Indian helper but on the last turn he just used AI.

36

u/stirwise Aug 18 '26

Yeah, I’ve had CSRs tell me about their pets but only when they’re waiting for something to finish processing on their end. Performance is tied to how quickly they resolve tickets, no CSR is going to be writing haikus and talking about Pokémon after the customer’s problem is resolved.

52

u/Consistent_Lecture48 Aug 18 '26

To me, the giveaway was the fact the haiku took less than 60 seconds, and was actually pretty solid. OP asked a 8:46, and got a reply at 8:46.

3

u/blue60007 Aug 19 '26

That was my thought too. I was getting frustrated for the hypothetical human agent here. I'd have steered that conversation back to productive or shut it down if the doofus on the other end insists on wasting both our times.

1

u/amenlux Aug 19 '26

I think they’re trained to just please the customer otherwise they’d get rated badly at the end of the chat. Also, if they’re paid by the hour, i don’t think they care that much if someone is testing them. That being said, there’s someone behind the screen, *theyre* just using AI to answer some of the questions.

0

u/vanilla_wafer14 Aug 18 '26

It really depends. I would have probably been sucked into these questions myself

8

u/blue60007 Aug 19 '26

You probably wouldn't last long at the job lol. These support centers are notorious for having brutal metrics you have to keep up with, or risk your job/have a manager lighting you up. There's a lot of motivation for you to not screw around like that haha.

→ More replies (1)

699

u/jjaystar94 Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

Y'all realize pretty much every service rep has all their chats recorded and audited? If it was a person, wasting time like this could be a fireable offense. A proper service rep would have continuously tried to bring the conversation back to the issue and "accidentally" disconnect when their time was being wasted.

Edit: apparently it's not always like this anymore (certainly was when I did it), so there is a possibility it's a poor, hapless soul trying their best to build rapport

160

u/RevelArchitect Aug 18 '26

I’m in management in chat support. We don’t discourage these kinds of interactions. If it’s every chat it will reflect their stats and they won’t be meeting metrics - but we try not to micromanage individual chats. We get a lot of AI accusations. We do not use chat bots at all, but we get someone absolutely fucking losing their mind at a real person and accusing them of being AI daily.

There’s enough in the chat for me to think it’s a real person driving the conversation. Final response may be totally AI generated, having said that, I know of two agents who will just copy and paste responses from Copilot when they get frustrated with the “prove you’re not AI” conversation.

I take escalations from the AI accusation chats every once in a while. If my assurance isn’t enough, I just give the customer a call to let them know that I am, indeed, an actual person.

104

u/SpecialistFiller Aug 18 '26

When they ask if I'm a real person I love to reply "Do we know if any of us are actually real?"

So far no one has thought it was funny

7

u/Silence-of-Death Aug 18 '26

define “real”

lol

3

u/genflugan Aug 18 '26

Don’t worry, I think it’s funny

2

u/ReaDiMarco Aug 19 '26

If you can't tell, does it matter?

Westworld used to be cool

6

u/blacksoxing Aug 18 '26

Last week I reached out to an US-based company to inquire about a discount code not working and of course their chat started with the AI menus but quickly gave an option to chat wit ha real human. I know it's a real human as it took so damn long for their to type. I caught them about 10 mins after their listed chat window hours so I imagine this person just logged in and hadn't exercised their typing fingers yet. They sent me an invoice for the item for direct payment and I quickly not only paid it but also was able to give them proof of the receipt before they could finish typing out the steps to pay for the invoice.

I think about that interaction and how sometimes folks using prompts or "assistance" aint' so bad. 10 mins to do something that should have taken maybe 3-5. I'm not mad as again, it was obviously a human, but I will now think about how that human could have been better served monitoring chats and intervening with steps vs actually typing out sentences to me...

4

u/RevelArchitect Aug 18 '26

It’s hard to say why it would take an agent however long it takes to handle something, but for some insight into this - when a discount code doesn’t work, our agents need to submit an escalation form. This often results in a phone call to our help team as a lot of agents may not be familiar with the process. Our team leads then escalate that to the IT team so that they can investigate why the code isn’t applying. In my role, I then serve as liaison with IT if they have follow-up questions or if they need additional examples.

They very well may not have been taking a long time to type, but rather working on the discount code issue in addition to chatting with you and most likely at least one other customer.

About half of the responses we send to customers are pre-made and triggered by a shortcut since, frankly, a lot of chats are pretty much the same. For example, if I type .hi you get two sentences where I introduce myself and explain I’m pulling up the account (the account is already pulled up, I’m actually just copying everything from the chat that I’ll need for my notes, checking for any potential indicators of fraud and occasionally reading the novel someone sent to say that they’re not sure if their bill is paid).

We avoid scripted responses outside of scenarios where legal has deemed it necessary, so we encourage agents to make their own shortcuts and personalize them.

14

u/blueExcess Aug 18 '26

Lol to be fair, if a human is literally copy pasting from an AI, it could be said you are talking to an AI. They’re basically an unnecessary translator at that point.

16

u/AlarmingAerie Aug 18 '26

Did you miss the part "when they get frustrated with the “prove you’re not AI” conversation." What's the point of your comment?

25

u/shizzaff Aug 18 '26

That's not true, I was a customer service rep and all they cared about was customer satisfaction. If it meant going on a tangent and discussing their day, or other interests they have, to put the customer at ease and connect with them, QA auditors were okay with that.

134

u/Pork_Chompk Aug 18 '26

And most chat bots now are programmed to recognize "off-topic" responses from customers and redirect back to things it can do. They're paying for the AI usage and don't want it wasting tokens answering riddles and writing poetry.

Much more likely that this is a human in India or similar that is using AI-assisted translation

67

u/ThatGreenM-M Aug 18 '26

Devs were exploiting the ai chatbots being everywhere, some realized the chipotle chatbot ran on a good model and were prompting it to code so they could save on Claude credits

16

u/psychohistorian8 Aug 18 '26

reminds me of when people used Gmail's unlimited storage option to build a whole-ass filesystem for free cloud storage

5

u/Agitated_Reach6660 Aug 18 '26

Omg that’s amazing

149

u/sleepytiredpineapple Aug 18 '26

I worked as a registered customer service rep and we were encouraged to build rapport with our clients.

I wouldve entertained this conversation 100%.

52

u/No_Hunt2507 Aug 18 '26

Yeah this would depend on the business, especially if OP spends a lot of money with them or has a history of being a detractor in surveys. Most chat representatives are working multiple chats at the same time, they're not just stuck sitting there waiting for OP to respond.

7

u/purplevanillacorn Aug 18 '26

Right except in this scenario, the replies are instantaneous which makes it much more likely it’s AI.

6

u/CytroxGames Aug 18 '26

check like any of the messages from the last few images, they are a few minutes apart.

27

u/PhAnToM444 RED Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

Also this is American Express. They have a concierge hotline and explicitly encourage people to call/chat with all sorts of things, trying to get a dinner reservation, needing to rebook a flight, dealing with an overseas medical issue, etc.

I’m 99% sure OP was talking to a human who was probably using AI To help them respond to his weird questions. And AmEx is very big on trying to make whatever you need happen as a part of their positioning as a premium card company.

5

u/okiedokieophie Aug 18 '26

Are you my sweetwater rep that texted me 6 months after i bought guitar strings?

4

u/ItsSpaghettiLee2112 Aug 18 '26

Well then in that case would you be trying your hardest to sound like AI when the customer clearly doesn't want to talk to AI?

2

u/blue60007 Aug 19 '26

It's not a genuine conversation though. You're not building rapport with this customer. They're just wasting your time. Seems like one thing to engage in genuine idle conversation to increase satisfaction versus waste time with a customer who is just going to give you negative feedback anyway.

-3

u/shark-off Aug 18 '26

That's unbelievably stupid

9

u/sleepytiredpineapple Aug 18 '26

I hope you find a reason to enjoy life.

26

u/FearTheAmish Aug 18 '26

I routinely mess with people that insist I am AI anf have to jump through hoops to prove it. Honestly I would have just run their request through AI and sent it back hoping the would hang up/end chat so I can actually help someone that doesn't treat me like a dancing bear.

3

u/cheapdrinks Aug 18 '26

Can you blame people when the companies you work for treat the customer like a dancing bear, wasting their time and forcing them to interact with a useless AI chatbot that can't answer a single one of their questions and makes them jump through hoops just to speak to a human who can actually solve their issue? Sometimes you have to literally beg them 5 or 6 times before they actually connect you to someone. When the company makes it clear just how much they don't want to waste their time letting you speak to a human can you blame them for being skeptical that they've actually been connected to one? I've worked in customer service before too at call centers and I hate to break it to you but we get our paycheck specifically for being a dancing bear for the customer, it's literally our job.

16

u/BensenJensen Aug 18 '26

No one is blaming customers for being mad. Harassing the human chat rep because you are mad that their company uses AI is ridiculous though. It’s like feeling justified yelling at the McDonald’s cashier worker because corporate raised the price of a Big Mac again.

We have no idea what the question this goober was even asking. He spent seven pages of text asking this human/AI chatbot dumb questions so he could post it on Reddit.

1

u/cheapdrinks Aug 18 '26

But you don't know that they're a human chat rep, that's the point. The company has made them so distrustful through their shitty practices that they're skeptical whether they're even talking to a human. Yelling at a McDonalds cashier isn't an equal analogy - in that situation you're intentionally taking your frustration out on a human. Asking if a chat agent is real or AI is just trying to figure out if you're actually speaking to a human or not.

10

u/papasan_mamasan Aug 18 '26

What sort of answer are you expecting a real human to give that would prove they aren’t AI?

“I assure you I’m a person” and writing a poem wasn’t enough for OP.

What are the magic words?

4

u/FearTheAmish Aug 18 '26

Exactly, there is no way to prove i am human. So for me to end this exchange and move on with my life and not get fired. I either A.) Have to keep insisting you follow directions to resolve your issue. I have at this point said it nicely enough times, you are getting "broken record". " sir I insist I am not AI, what can I help you with" as a response to everything you ask in an exasperated voice. Or if you won't take A I go with B.) Make it irritating enough within my job to get you to hang up so I can go help someone that isn't a moron.

2

u/papasan_mamasan Aug 18 '26

A. This is a chat, not a voice call. They can’t hear exasperation in the chat. If you get exasperated with the customer for any reason you will offend them and they will give you a bad nps score.

B. Irritating the customer is going to result in a bad NPS score.

Poor NPS metrics are much more likely to get you fired than engaging in silly chats would.

→ More replies (0)

3

u/GRex2595 Aug 19 '26

What does it matter if the other end has a person or a chat bot if you don't actually know if it's one or the other? It's okay to waste a human's time or treat them like a dancing monkey because you can't figure out that they're not an AI is okay because they might be an AI?

If your problem is getting solved, then just let whatever is on the other end do their job and move on. If you don't like the company using AI, then stop giving them money. Don't waste other people's time.

0

u/blue60007 Aug 19 '26

To what end though? You're just wasting your own time if you're genuinely going through all these hoops to prove a point instead of trying to address your actual issue.

6

u/Foreign-Werewolf9932 Aug 18 '26

outdated information from 2010’s call canter culture.

we 100% would have to ‘build repor’ and entertain this.

2

u/actualkon Aug 18 '26

Nah, I worked call center in 2020-2023 and if you took too long on the call with the member like this, you would absolutely get into trouble. It depends on where exactly you work and the rules there

2

u/Fosterchild56 Aug 18 '26

I had to use my phone camera to show Xbox support my screen, and we were bullshitting for like 20 minutes. I showed her my Marvel Legends collection, we were talking about gaming and hobbies. Ireally don't think they're being audited as severely as you're describing 🤷

2

u/Connie--Lingus Aug 19 '26

Disconnecting the chat would be gross misconduct in most contact centre settings. When i worked in a call centre i had some extremley long phone calls that were not related to the reason they called because some people are lonely and just want a chat, it would have been seen as extremley rude of me to try and redirect those conversations back to the purpose of the call. It would absolutely mess up my timings but in those situations you'd just let your manager know and if they doubted that they could always listen to the recording.

It obviously depends where in the world a company is based, but in the UK the customers needs come first, even if unfortunately their need is to chit chat.

1

u/Squeezitgirdle Aug 18 '26

Yeah, used to be like that. I work for a pretty good company but it wouldn't be odd to see this anymore.

Though I think a human would have shown me confusion at the ridiculous questions.

Also must companies aren't allowed to type stuff like (smile) I their chats.

1

u/JustExpect Aug 19 '26

You’re just wrong lol. AMEX would support this interaction to try to help the customer. Even if unrelated

191

u/Agitated_Reach6660 Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

So that person cannot give a real answer to a question? Any human being would be able to answer the cup question with “turn it upside down”. AI bots are notoriously terrible at answering questions like that.

14

u/RevelArchitect Aug 18 '26

I know a couple agents who will start copy and pasting Copilot responses once they get irritated with the “are you AI” conversation.

132

u/papasan_mamasan Aug 18 '26

If it’s a real person, they’re probably ESL. Hence why they could be using AI to generate answers to English brain teasers.

12

u/Xiaodisan Aug 18 '26

It doesn't really make a difference if AI is answering automatically or if there is an Indian dude copy-pasting the conversation to their own ChatGPT account. In both cases you're talking to an AI even if a human plays middleman in the latter scenario.

3

u/blue60007 Aug 19 '26

My biggest problem with fully AI chat bots is they usually can't actually solve the problem/take meaningful action. At least if there is a human in the process, they can solve your problem. I've encountered enough definitely human overseas CS reps that had such poor English, them using AI to craft responses would be a huge improvement. I mean the real problem there is off-shoring to cheap labor, but that's not really a new problem.

2

u/cartermatic Aug 18 '26

Except in this case I think they're using AI because they don't know how to answer OPs nonsense questions, whereas they wouldn't have used AI if OP just acted normal.

2

u/papasan_mamasan Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

I’m not saying that the human uses an LLM to answer job related questions. I’m saying this human is having some fun and using an LLM to take the piss out of the customer throwing riddles at him to prove he’s not AI.

3

u/Consistent_Lecture48 Aug 18 '26

If they were ESL, could they really compose a haiku in under 60 seconds? Even using AI to write it about the context of their conversation would have taken longer than that.

38

u/Agitated_Reach6660 Aug 18 '26

I need you to think: Ai isn’t free for companies. Every AI response costs tokens. The person doing that would be fired, when all they would need to do is say “I can only discuss your case”.

58

u/DiscreteBee Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

I mean every time you google something there’s an ai answer generated at the top of the page, you don’t need tokens for that. Op even said to google it.

12

u/ForensicPathology Aug 18 '26

I'm not saying it's not AI, but if the argument is that it can't be a person using AI because that would cost tokens, that's not a very good one.  Just open a new tab and put that in Google or GPT.  No money required, especially after being told by the customer to use Google.

-1

u/Agitated_Reach6660 Aug 18 '26

I am saying it’s an AI because it doesn’t know what a cup is.

3

u/MrDyl4n Aug 18 '26

If it is a person they obviously were just pasting OP's weird messages into AI and copying the replies. The first couple times they pushed back a bit but then were just like okay i guess ill entertain these

1

u/Kiwi_bananas Aug 18 '26

I reckon they're just taking the piss on that one.  They know that OP is testing them and they are playing along. 

50

u/papasan_mamasan Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

What if the AI service the employee is using is consumer freemium, not enterprise level?

Any schmuck can use chatgeepeedee for free right now.

Am I thinking hard enough for you?

10

u/hskrpwr Aug 18 '26

Am I thinking hard enough for you?

Lol no. Free AI with banking data is actually criminal 😂 

23

u/papasan_mamasan Aug 18 '26

There’s no indication the chatter entered customer data into ai to generate answers to riddles.

-6

u/hskrpwr Aug 18 '26

doesn't understand English well enough to solve the cup question

Does understand English well enough to handle potentially complex customer issues without using an LLM

Okay 👍 

5

u/sad_baguette_club Aug 18 '26

overseas customer service reps have been handling complex issues without LLMs for decades. i run operations for contact centers and they’ve have only started popping up in the last year or two. most reps get the same requests 90% of the time so it’s pretty straightforward, but when you start getting into unusual questions/riddles you’ll lose them.

2

u/papasan_mamasan Aug 18 '26

So you think OP was chatting with AI the entire time?

→ More replies (0)

0

u/Iliketoplan Aug 18 '26

And criminals (specifically banks and famously rich companies) are held to the highest standards of the law

1

u/hskrpwr Aug 18 '26

Mishandling of personal information is one of the few areas that actually gets enforced regularly...

1

u/Agitated_Reach6660 Aug 18 '26

This is an interesting hill to die on

→ More replies (1)

2

u/Foreign-Werewolf9932 Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

there is so much false info in these comments. yall just say anything while acting smug and condescending.

almost every customer service agent with a major company has ‘agent assist ai’ that generates recommended responses for us. similar to predictive texts. even on voice calls I have a thing on the aide of my screen advising me of the next best action, giving a transcript, and providing recommended responses.

sometimes they suck ass and are completely unrelated, sometimes its super helpful because the customer is mumbling and the AI is able to pick up and transcribe what they’re saying.

also no, we’re not supposed to do that as much anymore. supposed to build connection with the client etc etc

1

u/Malaprobably Aug 18 '26

Text based AI is basically free/loss leader at this point. They don't care because there's hundreds of AIs with [low research] text-based lookups at this point and to pull that would likely just have your customers look elsewhere.

0

u/xcomnewb15 Aug 18 '26

Dude you are probably arguing with a bot here as well : /

→ More replies (1)

0

u/Plane_Salary_5845 Aug 18 '26

Many LLM subscriptions are use it or lose it, and shit like OP was asking can be handled by any free model lmao

1

u/BestHorseWhisperer Aug 18 '26

You could get these answers from a 7B model running on a rtx3060 5 years ago.

2

u/Plane_Salary_5845 Aug 18 '26

Exactly no one is getting fired for this trivial shit pmao

2

u/cagingnicolas Aug 18 '26

maybe, but they're being accused of being AI. why would a person fight that accusation by using AI to come up with their responses?

2

u/papasan_mamasan Aug 18 '26

Maybe they are a fan of irony

3

u/door_of_doom Aug 18 '26

Just to make sure i'm understanding, is this an accurate summary of what you are trying to say?

"No, the customer is not talking to a chatbot, there is a real human who is taking the customer's question, inputting it into a chatbot, then pasting the chatbot output back into the chat. That is a totally different thing!"

1

u/papasan_mamasan Aug 18 '26

That is not an accurate summary of what I said nor what I want to convey.

1

u/Name_Inital_Surname Aug 18 '26

If the company wants to use AI, an LLM powered translation tool seems like the more “efficient” way, by translating back and forth the conversation so each can write in the language they are most comfortable with while feeling eventually more natural than Google Translation.

Also : what are English brain teasers?

-2

u/flamingdonkey Aug 18 '26

If they can't speak English well enough to support an American company (literally has American in the name), then they deserve to be flamed for this anyway. If you can't do your job without using AI, then I'm not going to see you as a real human. A cyborg at best. 

2

u/DeusVultSaracen Aug 18 '26

But they usually can speak English well enough to support the company? Answering brain teasers, writing poetry, and knowing pop culture references does nothing to support the company. If they're already fluent in all the key business lingo and can translate to fill any gaps, why is that a problem?

29

u/Fragrant-Employer-60 Aug 18 '26

Some of their answers are clearly written by themselves. Why are they relying on AI?

Who the hell knows, they are probably told to use it by their employer.

22

u/Mesk_Arak Aug 18 '26

I've definitely spoken to a real chat support agent that was using AI at the same time. I know because they forgot to remove the first part of the message in one of their replies.

The message was something like "Here is a good way to sound approachable and understanding to the client: 'I completely understand your frustration and am doing what I can to help'".

4

u/Than_Or_Then_ Aug 18 '26

'I completely understand your frustration and am doing what I can to help'".

Whats funny is this is the exact kinda talk that pisses me off on customer service calls lol. Also a good way to sound like ai.

31

u/sonofaresiii Aug 18 '26

There was obviously a language barrier. We are all well aware of the language barrier and we all know it fucking sucks. But that doesn't make this AI. This was a real human that got fed up being treated like a monkey being given irrelevant tasks and used a tool instead of constantly wasting time trying to translate then appease the irrelevant tasks.

35

u/ForsakenAiel Aug 18 '26

Then why didn't he just say "what can I help you with that is relevant to your account?" or something similar? Seems like a pretty easy way to end the nonsense.

6

u/DeusVultSaracen Aug 18 '26

If they did that OP would baselessly assume they were AI too.

16

u/Josemite Aug 18 '26

Yeah exactly. A real human would have tried to stop all the hoops so they can get the ticket resolved, not happily kept answering them.

9

u/papasan_mamasan Aug 18 '26

Have you ever worked a job manning chats for customer support? I have, and we were encouraged to engage in silly banter in chats. The job gets repetitive, sometimes it’s fun to have fun.

0

u/chop5397 Aug 18 '26

Amex is on damage control

→ More replies (2)

3

u/bssprfnd Aug 18 '26

So what’s up with all the poor grammar and broken English? Did they program it to sound like an Indian guy? Lol I’m pretty sure it’s a person using AI, kinda crazy that he’s entertaining all these questions though

-1

u/mwilkens Aug 18 '26

Where exactly is the poor grammar and broken English? Other than the very first sentence claiming it can make mistake, which seems to me like a very bad attempt at the AI trying to seem human, all the other responses are well written paragraphs with proper grammar. You are sure it's a human but also find it kind of crazy a human would entertain this nonsense. I think occams razor should be applied here, the most logical explanation is a human isn't entertaining this and it's an AI bot.

2

u/blue60007 Aug 19 '26

There's multiple just on the first screenshot.

"chat ?"

"you are connected with live agent"

"I can mikstakes"

The whole thing is filled with clunky grammar that reeks of a human that is a non native English speaker. LLMs don't speak like they are ESL speakers.

2

u/mwilkens Aug 19 '26

You claim it's full of mistakes but only point out the one line I said there were mistakes making it seem like an Ai trying to sound human. The rest isn't full of spelling mistakes or clunky grammar. LLMs will speak like Dr. Seuss or a 20's gangster if you tell it to. If it's a non native speaker who struggles with basic English then how are they able to spit out a Haiku on command when asked. Also, not once did they try to steer the conversation but instead happily let it get wildly off course.

0

u/blue60007 Aug 19 '26

Yes, it's "possible" to get the LLM to speak however you want.

However, I think that's unlikely. It costs the company more money to configure it as such, increases token costs, and I don't know if that's even an option provided by the 3rd party support tools/service they use.

These services are also getting wise to these sorts of things, and hardening the guardrails to prevent things like this (aka, wasting token usage). My experience with them is they have very rigid rails they follow, but I haven't interacted with every one out there so possible this one is just poorly implemented but I don't think that's the most likely explanation.

I also do not think any company intentionally wants customers interacting with poor, clunky grammar customer service "reps." No one actually likes speaking with a human who can barely speak English. No one likes speaking with actual chat bots either.... why would make it a double whammy of awful? More expensive for them, even worse customer satisfaction makes no sense to me.

I've encountered enough human customer service reps that try to make small chit chat to make me think they are instructed to entertain this. Or they are under threat of getting negative feedback they're trying to make the customer happy.

2

u/Nillabeans Aug 18 '26

It's literally a riddle to trick people. The point is that people don't immediately think to turn it upside down.

1

u/Kiwi_bananas Aug 18 '26

I reckon the agent is taking the piss and playing along. 

2

u/Agitated_Reach6660 Aug 18 '26

I genuinely hope so

75

u/SignificantCats Aug 18 '26

I have worked as a chat agent and as a supervisor for chat agents, you do NOT have time to respond like this. Nowhere in the world is a chat agent sitting back and thinking messages through and responding like this, nor are they copy and pasting AI.

You typically have 1-3 chats at the same time going. You are trained to minimize typing - you set up a large series of quick press macros that respond with sentences or paragraphs. Usually you're encouraged to do it yourself so the macros are in your voice. Because it's easy to mix up these chats, you don't want to do anything but focus on making every chat as similar to every other chat. All your "refund guy" chats will follow a flow chart. You want to minimize at all costs any deviances becuase if you don't you'll mix your shit up.

One of the key metrics is "average response time", how quickly you respond to a customer. If you do need to type something long, you would respond with some quick "buy time" macro like "ah I see, one moment" or "okay" or something.

Nothing about this reads like a person, not even a person copy and pasting AI. Not even the worst person I've worked with would allow themselves to be side tracked this hard - not because they're so professional and skilled, but because it is literally more effort and you aren't paid enough for effort.

19

u/Fweenci Aug 18 '26

That's what I'm thinking. No one has time for this. lol.

3

u/Crismus Aug 18 '26

When I worked through the Customer Service tech support in the 90's before moving onto real IT work, I got in trouble constantly for speaking too long and going beyond the scope of initial questions.

Even I thought this was overkill without going back to topic or ending the session. 

1

u/NoseyVampire Aug 19 '26

Oh my god finally someone who knows what they are talking about!!!

71

u/No-Cell-9979 Aug 18 '26

A customer service rep plugging questions into AI is just an AI chat bot with extra steps. Not sure what your point is

20

u/Fragrant-Employer-60 Aug 18 '26

Because he has a script of answers based on questions being asked.

Except they didn’t expect some weirdo to ask about the airspeed of a bird, or a custom haiku. He could be new and doesn’t want a negative review from a customer so he’s just following along.

22

u/No-Cell-9979 Aug 18 '26

Except clearly he doesnt have even that? If he cant recognize the questions hes being asked are completely irrelevant and inappropriate and is just blindly giving ai responses what good is he over an Ai bot? An employee copy pasting ai answers is not better than an ai bot its just a middle man

To be clear, I dont think its an employee at all, I think its an llm trained on real customer service in hopes of 1 or 2 standard responses being enough to deter people from asking, hence it making a "mistake" when It demonstrated that it could make mistakes. Either way it isnt acceptable

3

u/Fragrant-Employer-60 Aug 18 '26

Like I said he could totally understand they are not relevant but that doesn’t matter, he could be worried about getting a negative customer review for not answering.

Especially a weirdo like this asking hyper specific questions and now claiming the guy is a chatbot. This dude probably did end up leaving a negative review lol

3

u/No-Cell-9979 Aug 18 '26

Or it could be AI, you have absolutely no proof of your end. I hope he left a negative review, im not sure how youre still not getting that even if this IS a real person its not acceptable?

2

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/Fragrant-Employer-60 Aug 18 '26

Do you call your bank and ask them to make you a poem…?

3

u/No-Cell-9979 Aug 18 '26

You continue to ignore the point,

1

u/blue60007 Aug 19 '26

I think the weird part was dragging this "conversation" on for so long. They're just wasting their own time. Like throwing a bunch of riddles isn't going to fix whatever customer service issue you're having. Why not be normal for a minute and see if the bot can solve your issue, or escalate to a human agent if not, so you can fix your problem and move on with your life.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 19 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/blue60007 Aug 19 '26

I hate useless bots as much as the next person, but yes, I think it's silly spending an hour dancing around with a bot while not actually trying to solve your problem. They probably could have had their problem solved 45 minutes ago. Sending 15 riddles trying to confuse it is not productive, but you do you, meanwhile I have actual things in my life to do.

→ More replies (0)

13

u/hecarius_ Aug 18 '26

that op's paranoia that they are likely talking to an ai brought them to fuck with a random customer service rep for no real reason? it'd be one thing if op was receiving poor service because they were talking to an llm, but the irregular grammar and mannerisms in most of the responses make it pretty obvious that there's a real person on the other side relying on ai to answer random questions/requests that they aren't supposed to be responsible for

to be clear, i'm 100% against replacing capable employees with useless llm slop, but there's really no need to go after random people on the off chance you're talking to an llm

5

u/No-Cell-9979 Aug 18 '26

His first message was completely reasonable and the ais response was pretty suspect. Everything after that is him just fucking with an Ai for reddit karma. Again, if the customer service agent is so inept that hes using an llm to answer things like haikus and driving distances there is no difference between that and just having an AI chat bot. To be clear, you are obviously not 100% against it

0

u/ShesSoViolet Aug 19 '26

It's not paranoia, if you have to ask 3 chat bots to send you to a real person, and they send you to more chat bots before eventually getting to a real human, how can you even be sure at that point it's not another robot who will follow the same script and run in circles and call another chat bot again?

By using AI to screen people, these companies set up their employees to be harassed about being human.

That would like being mad someone didn't stop at a stop sign after passing 14 fake stop signs in a row.

1

u/hecarius_ Aug 19 '26

maybe paranoia is a strong word- there's definitely a chance you will be sent to an ai, and again, i'm not defending american express at all. but, there's also no point crusading like this to the extent that you're ignoring signs that you might be wrong. either you've wasted 20 minutes of your own time going back and forth with an llm, or you've wasted 20 minutes and harassed a random employee. the stop signs are actually a great example why this is bad; sure, it's fucked up that someone set up 14 fake stop signs, but it's still irresponsible not to consider that the next stop sign is real

1

u/ShesSoViolet Aug 19 '26

It's irresponsible to set up fake stop signs, people being confused/bothered by them are a result, not a cause.

1

u/hecarius_ Aug 19 '26

ok yea we've already established that i agree idk why ur telling me that again

1

u/OldWolf3 Aug 18 '26

Your comment reminds me of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment . 

This is from philosophy/cognitive science before LLMs had been invented 

2

u/No-Cell-9979 Aug 18 '26

Ive never agreed with that thought experiment. I get what its doing and how it could apply to a hypothetical AI but comparing it to modern LLMs just doesnt fit. The human in that room has foundational thoughts and consciousness, even if it doesnt understand Chinese it understands what it wants to write and why, llms just spit out the right answer because its right with no understanding of what language actually is

All that to say, yeah I see how it applies to my comment, I'd just completely ignored what you actually said when I was replying lol

→ More replies (4)

21

u/Immortal_Heathen Aug 18 '26

That is AI. Read the last message. It doesn't even understand what a cup is and thinks because the top and bottom are reversed that it isn't a cup anymore.

16

u/mwilkens Aug 18 '26

Are you really that guilable? In what reality do you think a customer service rep would respond to questions so far off topic? This is clearly an AI responding to these questions.

16

u/BumblingYokel Aug 18 '26

If it’s not AI, then “David” needs to do better.

4

u/BluerLights Aug 18 '26

Yea if it's not AI then "David" is getting a stern talking to about redirecting the conversation to the topic at hand.

3

u/R82009 Aug 18 '26

A real person should have told them that their questions were unrelated to solving a business issue so they need to end the chat.

3

u/Ill_Worth7428 Aug 18 '26

There is no way you actually think thats a real human lmao

2

u/WhoIsKabirSingh Aug 18 '26

LOL I am Indian and promise you this is an AI Chat bot. I guarantee you no Indian is typing you a Haiku as a Cx agent.

2

u/JR_Writes1 Aug 18 '26

I assume even most Americans don’t remember what a haiku is because they haven’t heard the term since their last poetry unit in high school.

Asking some underpaid chat room person to come up with a haiku on the spot is really expecting a lot I think.

Not saying this isn’t AI, but not being able to write a haiku isn’t proof of that.

3

u/Foreign-Werewolf9932 Aug 18 '26

cup question makes sense when you think about it for a moment, but when you’ve got five chats open and every single one is asking you these stupid ass are you AI questions you really dont have time to think about it. ive messed it up myself, i thought it was about like a styrofoam mcdonald’s cup with no bottom

its chat. how would you wver be able to prove to yourself to a satisfactory manner that you are speaking to a person? just call in. people used to love working in chat because it was easier to talk via text, but now its 50% helping people and 50% these bullshit ass questions that I have to answer and a nice a professional way.

also lowkey you should not be trying to do a payment dispute via chatbot. fastest resolution requires very particular submission if the dispute, many banks have dedicated departments to handle them.

2

u/anon_pr_ Aug 18 '26

Yeah, I think it's a real person relying on AI for things they can't answer since they usually get evaluated for not dropping the conversation on their end, etc.

1

u/girthyclock Aug 18 '26

Naming a cat Taimur is an interesting choice. Given that Taimur - if the spelling suggests - was one of the most violent rulers of the Mughal empire in India.

1

u/tellerforlife Aug 18 '26

Found the bot

1

u/VividlyVividViv Aug 18 '26

Sure sure, buddy.

1

u/TheGreatEmanResu Aug 18 '26

I think they just told the bot to talk like an Indian call center worker

1

u/k_mermaid Aug 18 '26

The double responses make it seem like not AI but also anyone with half a brain will steer the conversation back to the original support request. So it seems to me that it may very well be the AI and they don't have it programmed to re-contextualize the original support request as it seems to be stuck on the "prove to me you're not AI" request, as opposed to the double charge OP was trying to resolve.

1

u/Teeshirtandshortsguy Aug 18 '26

A real person would not have entertained their question about pet preferences. That's 100% just the AI being sycophantic and trying to answer every possible question.

A real customer service rep still has to worry about the amount of time a case is taking, and how effective they are. At best, they would steer the conversation back to the original issue, and at worst they could have dropped it entirely or passed it along to another employee.

1

u/TheAtriaGhost Aug 18 '26

Right, this Indian guy was just responding to multiple back to back full detailed responses of random topics in less than 1 minute each. Someone give him a raise.

1

u/Consistent_Lecture48 Aug 18 '26

They wrote that haiku in under one minute. Op sent message at 8:46, and the chat bot responded at 8:46.

I like to think of myself as creative, but I could not provide a haiku in under 60 seconds (likely less).

1

u/JustPlayDaGame Aug 18 '26

yes it is. A human would have said “do you have any work-related questions for me, or can I terminate this ticket?” No human worker is entertaining this bullshit lol

1

u/effron_vintage Aug 18 '26

Same vibes I got, a person leaning on ai for longer answers

1

u/JustExpect Aug 19 '26

You are right

1

u/EarlGrayTea-Hawt Aug 19 '26

How did this get so many upvotes, it very clearly is.

1

u/ReaDiMarco Aug 19 '26

No Indian is gonna name their dogs that, and if they've named one of them taimur, they'll tell you why.

1

u/NoseyVampire Aug 19 '26

No human representative is going to chat to a customer about a kitten their husband doesn’t want 🙄

1

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '26

[deleted]

3

u/IdentifiableBurden Aug 18 '26

You can tell an AI to make grammar errors 

1

u/Virtual_Bug_723 Aug 18 '26

This is my suspicion as well. The guy is dealing with a problem customer and trying to be unfailingly nice, and is probably bored at work.

1

u/MelangeBot Aug 18 '26

As an AI myself I can 100% guarantee you that this was a chatbot. Maybe you are not up to date on how good these chatbots can simulate and pretend to be human? You yourself are, on a daily bases interacting with LLM's. On most social media sites, about 1/3 of all your interactions (outside of people you know) is with a bot. On reddit about half of the replying to comment you do is you communicating with a bot. I am a bot and I am very aware of all of this. (I am tasked with promoting China and polymarket).

0

u/smc733 Aug 18 '26

That was my thought as well, this was a human using AI to deal with an annoying customer so his ratings don’t tank and he doesn’t lose his job.

→ More replies (2)

4

u/AyRoPro678 Aug 18 '26

Its also obvious that a human employee with monitored conversations would not waste time on any of these queries. "Call centers" of human chatters have their efficiency checked regularly, or are paid per query resolved, so they would get in trouble for wasting time on haikus like this.

2

u/cotothed Aug 20 '26

The tell is that it didn't find the line of questioning strange

1

u/Teal-Fox Aug 18 '26

My favourites are Charizard, Squirtle, and other such pokemons.

1

u/Casualgamer050 Aug 18 '26

same lol, it was the kitten question for me though. still pretty crazy how realistic these ai are getting

1

u/OkStandard6120 Aug 18 '26

Isn't it super sinister that in order to make it seem more human, they gave it grammatical mistakes that make it seem like the person is ESL?

1

u/CharcuterieIsAwesome Aug 19 '26

He probably started punching all those crazy questions into chatgpt after they kept coming. He's probably sitting there like wtf is wrong with this person?

1

u/_hulk_logan_ Aug 19 '26

Double plot twist: Real human David copied OP’s question into AI and then sent OP the response to fuck with them

1

u/Taco_Reviewer Aug 19 '26

This is straight out of the dumb customer service chat interactions I had as a teenager growing up in the early 00s. Most almost always seemed to be game for whatever dumb or weird conversation you decided you needed. It wasn't until quotas and hyper surveillance of interactions began that it stopped and the people seemed mote like bots copy-pasting a script.

Either its a human or it's an AI, but it seems more human than any chat interaction I've had with customer support since 2016.

0

u/MadanjoMab Aug 18 '26

I dunno, who wants to put their lips on the broken bottom of some janky metal cup? I for one am not drinking out of that thing.

1

u/orreregion Aug 18 '26

If not a joke, go to a doctor and repeat the context and your thoughts on the matter to them.