Terence Eden Shamed Ocado's AI Bot Into a Human Reply
Just a little AI resistance, as a treat
After Ocado's customer service answered his detailed bug report about malformed calendar invites with a suspiciously polished, sycophantic, em-dash-laden message, Terence Eden vented in a one-star satisfaction survey. A few days later a real person wrote back, apologizing and thanking him for the diagnostic. His takeaway: using AI to triage and summarize complaints makes business sense, but using it to reply to a human is disrespectful.
But using an AI to reply to a human is just disrespectful. It says the organization values their customer's time at less than their own.
- mixedmath
The second response reads as very much written by AI to me too.
- jjgreen
I never contact customer service with a complaint, I just don't use them again. But I have, very occasionally, contacted customer service with a "could you pass on my thanks to ..." for a particularly good product or service. The last a couple of months ago to Marks & Spencer for whoever it was who discovered their Len de l'Ell wine, which is fabulous. I was so insulted by the AI response that I'll never do that again.
- delichon
As a grumpy misanthrope I welcome the trend of overly sycophantic AIs increasing the value of borderline rude thank you messages as a sign of actual human responses, increasing the demand for grumpy misanthropes on staff, and hope that AI can't emulate us well soon.
- PcChip
I'm fairly certain that second response is AI as well, unfortunately
- hyperionultra
Default llm gened text can be easily detected, but if operator provide sufficient style guide - it is almost undetectable. The second response was also llm, just with little bit of style guide.
- dabedee
Even if the second response used AI, it at least seams like someone took the time to edit it that response thoroughly to make it more digestible. I think that's what OP, and myself, would at least expect in that situation.
- 1612elphi
For as much as I like AI for (gestures broadly around the hacker news space), I am glad that I'm not alone in getting real upset at the endlessly incessant user-directed AI garbage, be it customer service emails, or ChatGPT generated event posters.
- tln
> But using an AI to reply to a human is just disrespectful. It says the organisation values their customer's time at less than their own.
One of the benefits of using AI to reply is faster replies... which values a customers time.
I think that good customer service can use AI. It's not AI composed replies that makes the customer service bad.