Post #3261880

2024-01-14 16:16 UTC

Moreover, I think there's a deeper problem here. Anybody who's ever tried to use large-company customer service (and I'm thinking of Amazon here) might say, "well a chatbot couldn't do much worse; it's not like talking to a person right now." There's a really handy concept called "failure demand". Some load on a system is "value demand". E.g., I walk up to the counter in the local store and say, "I'd like a quart of milk." But if have to come back later because they're out of milk or the milk was spoiled, that's "failure demand". For digital products, I'd argue most customer service demand is failure demand. So generally we shouldn't be putting ChatGPT in to tell people how to solve their problem, we should giving them good experiences in the first place. Chat's a bandaid. And bad customer service generates even more failure demand. So ChatGPT might lower costs, but it won't solve the root problems or on net improve things for customers. 8/

Replies (2)

@williampietri@sfba.social 2024-01-14 16:24

Ok, what's next? Right, "sales automation". This is a bit of a mix of the first two cases. "Sales" is a little bit customer support, and a lot of manipulation to get people to buy things. Setting aside the possible minor customer-support improvements, I think we're mostly back at content generation with contempt for the reader. One thing people have a hard time grasping is how much our economy spends on manipulating people to get money out of them. Advertising alone is hundreds of billions. Sales is surely at least that much. And then there's all the time lost to fending off the manipulation, plus the money lost when people fall for it. On the order of magnitude of the defense budget or all K-12 spending for sure. So a bullshit machine might be a good fit, but is this a hole we really need to dig deeper? 9/

Open ##3261881
@soaproot@sfba.social 2024-01-14 21:59

@williampietri@sfba.social A lot of customer support which isn't failure demand is feature requests, or corner cases, or other things not especially amenable to automation.

Open ##3261889