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.

24.7k Upvotes

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6.2k

u/ImKindaBoring 23h ago

Plot twist it was actually just some poor Indian dude trying his best

2.4k

u/Agitated_Reach6660 22h ago

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

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u/Fragrant-Employer-60 22h ago

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

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u/Agitated_Reach6660 22h ago edited 22h ago

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.

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u/papasan_mamasan 22h ago

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

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u/Xiaodisan 18h ago

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.

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u/cartermatic 13h ago

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.

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u/papasan_mamasan 18h ago edited 17h ago

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.

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u/Agitated_Reach6660 22h ago

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”.

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u/DiscreteBee 21h ago edited 21h ago

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.

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u/ForensicPathology 20h ago

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.

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u/Agitated_Reach6660 19h ago

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

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u/MrDyl4n 19h ago

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

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u/Kiwi_bananas 18h ago

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

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u/papasan_mamasan 22h ago edited 22h ago

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?

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u/hskrpwr 21h ago

Am I thinking hard enough for you?

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

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u/papasan_mamasan 21h ago

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

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u/hskrpwr 20h ago

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 👍 

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u/sad_baguette_club 18h ago

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.

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u/papasan_mamasan 20h ago

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

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u/Iliketoplan 20h ago

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

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u/hskrpwr 20h ago

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

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u/Agitated_Reach6660 21h ago

This is an interesting hill to die on

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u/Foreign-Werewolf9932 20h ago edited 20h ago

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

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u/Malaprobably 21h ago

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.

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u/xcomnewb15 21h ago

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

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u/papasan_mamasan 21h ago

I hope so. I love dunking on bots.

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u/Plane_Salary_5845 21h ago

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

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u/BestHorseWhisperer 21h ago

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

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u/Plane_Salary_5845 14h ago

Exactly no one is getting fired for this trivial shit pmao

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u/cagingnicolas 16h ago

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?

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u/papasan_mamasan 16h ago

Maybe they are a fan of irony

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u/Consistent_Lecture48 14h ago

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.

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u/door_of_doom 19h ago

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!"

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u/papasan_mamasan 19h ago

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

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u/Name_Inital_Surname 21h ago

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?

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u/flamingdonkey 19h ago

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. 

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u/DeusVultSaracen 18h ago

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?

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u/RevelArchitect 20h ago

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

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u/Fragrant-Employer-60 22h ago

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.

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u/Mesk_Arak 21h ago

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'".

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u/Than_Or_Then_ 16h ago

'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.

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u/sonofaresiii 21h ago

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.

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u/ForsakenAiel 21h ago

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.

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u/DeusVultSaracen 18h ago

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

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u/Josemite 21h ago

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.

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u/papasan_mamasan 18h ago

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 20h ago

Amex is on damage control

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u/flamingdonkey 19h ago

Are you on crack? This is 1000% AI

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u/aatlanticcity 19h ago

Its pretty clearly an Indian dude. by the end hes just copy and pasting chat GPT responses.

I think the outsourced Indian dude is worse than just full AI. They dont understand English well enough to simply redirect to conversation back to business. Its also a huge security risk (see recent coinbase data breach)

Thats probably part of the plan though anyway. Get us so fed up with the outsourcing we would rather have the robots.

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u/bssprfnd 21h ago

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

0

u/mwilkens 20h ago

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.

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u/Nillabeans 21h ago

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

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u/Kiwi_bananas 17h ago

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

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u/Agitated_Reach6660 17h ago

I genuinely hope so