Japan chain uses AI to gauge staff smiles, speech tones in QoS push

When you see the sort of pearly white stereotypical American diner smile almost everyone would associate it with insincerity and fakeness or gullibility.

Also as a side note, that may be a pretty good benchmark for how clever AIs are. How many systems can figure out how the "hide the pain Harold" type of image is actually perceived by people?

I've been on the receiving end of both numerous times and I'm not sure which I prefer if I'm honest.

- Door greeting. I prefer a fake smile. I'm not going to interact with you.

- I have a problem. I'm agnostic as long as you can help me.

Having just thought about it - there's different levels of fake and the shallower the interaction the less I care about your fake smile. But if we're at odds over an issue then I definitely don't want you to smile. That's comes across as a sociopath to me.

Interesting discoveries I just learned about myself.

I have to say I'm impressed by how quickly the EU managed to hash out AI regulations. I've only skimmed it but there are multiple good things there, on top of the above, like bans on critical decisions being taken only by AI, the need to have humans in the loop, the ability to be able to explain AI decisions for important things, etc.

It will definitely have kinks to iron out, but it's a good start and shows what good AI regulations could look like.

"Hello there, It's great to hear from you and I hope you're doing well today! I will be happy to assist you!"

I didn't make this up, this is a real message I got from a support team.

And if you're a manager, the world you live in is one of trying to maximize the performance of your employees. You don't think of this as exploiting them or refusing to consider their needs. You think of it as making sure you're doing your job.

The people who are doing this probably don't think of it in terms of an employee who's having a hard day being docked 0.78 Positivity Points for an Insufficiently Enthusiastic Greeting. They think of it as detecting when an employee isn't doing their job, which is their job. Thinking otherwise requires actively modeling other people, often people who are unlike you, people who might differ from you in a status hierarchy or that you might view as not having been as successful as you. And keep in mind that if you're a manager, you do encounter people who aren't doing their job all the time. It's not a surprising thing to encounter.

For better or worse, smiling at cusotmers is a meaningful part of a service job. Look at almost any review list for a retail establishment or restaurant, and service is going to show up in a lot of them. Maybe if customer preferences changed, it wouldn't be, but it's not like companies get to decide what their customers do or don't want.

And with that mindset, you can see how you'd get to the point of boasting about it. "Look how well I'm doing my job," you say. "I'm going to make sure we're delivering exactly what customers want by finding a clever new use of technology. Sure, some people won't like it, but what are they saying? That I shouldn't ask my employees to do their job?"

*None of this is meant to defend the idea. What they're doing is horribly dystopian.*

But if we want to actually fight that dystopia, we need to understand where it comes from, and it's not people going "hooray I can abuse my workers even more!". A few people at the top who are particularly clear-minded about things might think that, but most people don't. Managers want to sleep at night, too. Instead, it's people saying "hooray, I did my job, a thing that is important to my well-being and identity, really well today!".

The term "banality of evil" applies here, but it's worse than banality. It's the way in which banal evil satisfies very real and wholesome human needs. Some guy woke up in 1943 Germany, went to his train-engineering job, worked really hard all day to be the best darn train engineer he could possibly be because he loved doing it more than anything else in the world, and went home and went to bed deeply satisfied next to his loving wife. It's that guy we gotta figure out.

Imagine customers think you're an unhappy waiter. Should they be able to withhold tips because on their romantic evening they're spending time thinking about your personal circumstances? If we say yes then we're basically talking about financial carrot and stick to making people smile.

Employers only care insofar as customers care. The customer is the root reason.

Support staff in the US, and anywhere, for ages have had all their customer interactions recorded, and sentiment analysis run to automatically gauge them as being nice enough or not.

Amazon tracks warehouse worker's work-speed, and even has little tablets with games to try and make people work faster. You get fake virtual points and level up for fulfilling orders faster.

The company behind this also says it's trying to gamify a job requirement. These retail workers are required to smile and greet customers, and now it seems like they have an app that's giving them fake virtual points for doing a "good job".

I was at lunch today watching a guy complain to some random employee at a Fuddrucker's that they'd put the mushrooms on top of the melted cheese rather than put the mushrooms on first and then melted the cheese on top of them. He was berating this poor girl for long enough that it was still ongoing when my food - which had been ordered only a minute before his had been up to the counter - was ready.

This wasn't in Japan or Korea. It was a middle-aged, apparently-decently-well-off white guy at a medium-upscale mall in suburban California.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajsp.12322