Just a little AI resistance, as a treat

At the recent EMFCamp, I bumped in to Professor Kate Devlin who was talking a little about the AI Resist List. I think one of the useful things we can do is loudly complain about shitty uses of AI. Here's an example. As mentioned in a previous post, I'm contacting companies which send malformed calendar invites. One of the organisation I contacted was the British online supermarket Ocado. They don't have an easy way to contact their technical team, and no obvious paths to raise a bug report, so I filled in their usual customer service feedback form. I included a clear statement of the problem and a detailed technical analysis of why I thought it was a problem with their service. After sending in my message, I received this back from "Lulu" at Ocado: Thanks for getting in touch and sharing this feedback about our calendar files.

We really appreciate you taking the time to help us improve our service.

I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day I mean, that's AI right? It starts with the classic tell of a sycophantic agreement. Next up is the em-dash. Beloved by chatbots but almost unheard of in British English style guides. Finally (and this is hard to quantify) it just doesn't feel like a customer service response. They're usually poorly spelled, have dodgy grammar, and ask a bunch of irrelevant questions. The message gave me no confidence that anyone had looked at the problem and I doubted it had been passed on to a technically competent human. I immediately got a customer satisfaction survey. Usually I give top marks to humans because, even though Net Promoter Score is bullshit, I don't want customer service agents to suffer the indignity of a bad review. But in this survey I vented my spleen - giving crappy 1 ⭐ scores on every metric and complaining vociferously about how rude it is to use an AI to deal with a genuine complaint. I was both surprised and delighted to receive this back a few days after my invective was sent: I saw your survey comment about getting a robotic, AI-generated response previously, and I wanted to reach out personally to apologise.

There is nothing more frustrating than pointing out a legitimate bug only to feel like you're talking to a brick wall.

I promise you there is a real person typing this out! Second, I wanted to send a massive thank you for the incredibly detailed diagnostic. It is rare to get feedback that tells us exactly what is broken and how to fix it. I can assure you that this has been passed to our team to look into. Your feedback is going to make things much smoother for a lot of people, and we really appreciate you taking the extra time to help us get it right. Thank you again, I do hope that this issue is resolved quickly. If there is anything else I can help with in the meantime, please don't hesitate to get in touch. Perhaps I'm being touchingly naïve, but that feels a lot more human, right? The grammar isn't perfect, the sentences are a bit more rambly, and it appears to have actually engaged with the contents of my message. I get that having a million irate customer service messages is a hassle. Using AI to triage them probably makes business sense, summarising the verbose ones could be useful for customer service agents, and totting up general themes is almost certainly a sensible way to gather metrics without overloading the workforce. 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. It's OK to call out shitty AI responses and insist that a human engages with you.