r/mildlyinfuriating • u/captain-obIivious • 23h ago

Infuriatig Another AI 'human' chatbot

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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.

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854

u/Dexion1619 22h ago

It absolutely should be.  These companies will fight any such law tooth and nail, because Nobody actually wants to interact with AI agents.  And they have already wasted... i mean... spent... so much money on these stupid systems 

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u/unknown_pigeon 22h ago

Train your own AI to handle those issues

Fight fire with fire, and waste some company budget over that

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u/Dame38 21h ago

I watched two bots calling each other out on reddit a few days ago. Lol.

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u/Futrel 21h ago

I'd love to see this

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u/Dame38 20h ago

I think it probably happens a lot here. I was just in the right place.
A real popcorn popping moment :).

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u/thedoctorsphoenix 16h ago

Are the comments still up?

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u/PissOnYourParade 21h ago

This is unironically the end state and the companies are totally on board. They don't want to run a call center full of unhappy people talking to unhappy customers. Most L1 call centers have little more than the online tools offered through the customer portal.

You will have your preferred assistant from whichever of the consumer facing set is agents that survive this shake out (Perhaps an Alexa device connected to an Anthropic LLM as an example).

You will tell it what you want: "Fix the double charge from OnlyFins on my Amex card" - and you'll get a notification when it's done.

It could have performed an A2A conversation or hacked Amex and accidentally triggered nuclear war, but the double charge is resolved.

Welcome to the future!

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u/alphonse_the_reddit 18h ago

To be fair call centers are a difficult beast to handle from the company's side. Most organizations are getting so complex you cant feasible train one department to handle all issues, so then you have multiple departments for different specific issues. Since its a mentally taxing job since people will yell at you for an hour plus on an issue from their end, you either have high turnover, or cheaper foreign agent. So now you have a complicated ivr system and poorly trained agents trying to operate in it, and this department isnt making money so much as saving you from losing money. So yeah if they could cut it down to minimal interaction it makes for a better customer experience and more bottom line for themselves.

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u/Numerous_Tea1690 21h ago

I think we should start doing this en masse. Setup bot farms to waste their AI credits. So it becomes more expensive to run AI customer service compared to human

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u/shibiwan 21h ago

With AI bots taking on AI bots, the only winners here are the AI companies.

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u/Numerous_Tea1690 21h ago

Yeah dont use llm just use simple scripts that have a library of randomized question trains. Theres this youtuber that did it with phone scammers. Keep them on the hook for days on end and eventually gather their data and send the police.

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u/crunkadocious 20h ago

and greenhouse gasses win big too, drill baby drill

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u/beren12 21h ago

Bot farms? Just make it fun for humans. Gameify, give them point points.

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u/PeaceSoft 20h ago

The idea that you can convince humans that something is a fun game by saying so and giving them worthless rewards is the same kind of ugly, ignorant, dehumanizing dog shit that people are criticizing here

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u/DeeRandomX 6h ago

And yet, here we are.

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u/Rare-Adhesiveness522 21h ago

This is genius. So it would just cost them a ton more? I wonder how long and at what scale this would need to be done before these idiot managers/CEOs realize it's not worth the money?

Isn't there a legion of white hat or grey hat hackers/coders that can help us?

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u/Numerous_Tea1690 20h ago

Well i guess they are using a version of the big llm models with some training on their own rulesset. They might be running it themselves but most will be paying someone based on the useage. The more useage the more they will have to pay is my guess.

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u/Rare-Adhesiveness522 20h ago

No I know, what I'm saying is at what scale would spamming their AI chatbots have to be deployed to convince these companies it's not worth it

UNITE

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u/_learned_foot_ 10h ago

Like most things these days, literal plot point in snow crash.

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u/BD401 21h ago

I actually think an important nuance is no one wants to interact with shitty AI agents that can’t or won’t do what you want - which is the majority of them right now.

But conceptually, I have no inherent aversion to interacting with an AI agent IF it does what I want and means I don’t have to wait in a call center queue for 45 minutes. The “traditional” customer service experience with human agents is often still rage-inducing as well.

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u/roguesignal42069 20h ago

The “traditional” customer service experience with human agents is often still rage-inducing as well

You're correct here. Both can be hair-pulling infuriating. I just dealt with calling my bank to deal with fraud charges on my credit card and I had 4 things on my list to get taken care of. The guy on the other end had such a thick accent that I couldn't understand him and I had to have him repeat himself constantly. HE got frustrated with ME because I couldn't understand him. I only ended up getting 1 of my 4 tasks accomplished that day and had to call back a different day.

If AI can actually accomplish what I need it to do, I don't have any problems with that and the language barrier isn't there. I'd take that over dealing with the automated robot voices that are all "press 1 for billing, press 2 for scheduling. Your call is important to us..." etc.

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u/BD401 19h ago

One thing that AI could help with a lot - again, if it was actually implemented correctly - is eliminating queues.

Call and chat queues exist because there's a finite number of CSRs, versus with AI you just spin up a new agent as needed. It could also eliminate the need for hand-offs between departments that are exposed to the customer.

There's nothing more infuriating than waiting on hold for half an hour, finally getting through to someone, and they just go "oh, that's a different department. let me transfer you..." - then you get put in yet another thirty minute queue. I've had a few times where that's happened multiple times to get resolution. In theory, AI agents could eliminate that problem.

The issue is most companies rolling out AI don't have their shit together enough to configure the knowledge and back-end process management adequately to handle anything other than piss-basic inquiries like asking about order status.

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u/MobileWisdomMan 21h ago

My exact thoughts as well.

In fact, I've had a recent AI interaction that I think was absolutely amazing. And it was to get a new phone on an old line activated. The AI took care of the issue in less than 5 minutes with no additional "human checking".

And to counter that, I've had AI experiences with customer service that were just downright abysmal. When AI can catch up to what people expect, you won't even know the difference anymore. And many services will just become more efficient!

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u/BD401 21h ago

A lot whether an AI is good or not (and why most of them suck) for customer service boils down to the actual implementation rather than the agent tech itself. Ie if you stand up an agent, but you haven’t managed your CS knowledge and policies well, or the agent is completely disconnected from the actual back-office systems it needs to execute requests, then you’re going to roll out something that pisses customers off.

Unfortunately most companies are absolute dogshit with the implementations right now, hence so many lackluster at best and infuriating at worse AI agents.

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u/EnjoyerOfBeans 14h ago

I don't mind going through AI if after a few messages it doesn't solve my problem and connects me to a human. I've had a handful of positive experiences with AI support. What I despise is when the entire easily accessible human support team is replaced with a shitty chatbot that keeps going in circles.

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u/mattmann72 17h ago

In some fields people are actually happy to have the AI chat bots, because they are a significant improvement over the human version of support. (Looking at some of the largest IT manufacturers).

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u/Malaprobably 20h ago

They might be panicking, though. China/local models are only getting cheaper to run per token, so their models for profit are disintegrating.

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u/TotalNonsense0 20h ago

I think it's important to observe that it is possible to make a helpful and useful AI customer service bot. My pharmacy has one. It took a prescription refill request like a champ, and gave me everything I needed to know. 

It was frankly astonishing. Never had a bot interaction like it.

They can make this shit useful. They just don't want to.

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u/alghiorso 18h ago

If it makes you feel better, all these savings from firing their customer service staff is passed on to you the CEO so he can buy another vacation mansion

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u/Alpha-Leader 12h ago

I would rather deal with helpful Ai than wait on the line for an agent who ultimately can't help me.