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Comment by throwaway63467 | Hacker News Reader

For most consumers AI will be a net negative. Already I can tell more and more companies use it in their call centers and support workflows, often just to stonewall customers: they reply very politely and with great attention to detail but will not solve your issue as they don’t have any decision power.

I really don’t look forward to this new world, AI is a powerful and useful too for creators but it will and already is used for all the wrong reasons, apparently even to pick which targets to destroy in war, essentially making life or death decisions in some areas with little to no oversight. And then people here think that any kind of regulation around this tech is useless and unwarranted…

Don’t get me wrong I use AI all the time but I fear it will be the most disruptive technological development in both positive and negative ways that we have ever dealt with.

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The problem is a problem of choice I believe.

When we use AI ourselves via tools like chatbots, harnesses etc. we are mostly actively choosing to do so, and have some control. We can always just decide to stop and do the work ourselves if its not working out.

In the call center/situation of companies embedding it in their products, often its not in a way that gives users the choice. They are forcing it onto their users with no other option, or at the very least they are always forced to play along with the LLM until it finally gives up.

Its user hostile since we can't decide to break out of the LLM loop when we want to.

Add on top of that most of these companies are actually forcing the use of the AI related features simply to fulfill someones KPI's/internal metrics.

Well you also have to recognize that call centers are a net negative for every organization, especially as (almost) no one makes (B2C) purchases over the phone anymore. Whenever you call a company you are costing them money. With automation, you cost them less money. If they inconvenience you, all that does is discourage you from calling them more, which, again, leads to even more savings for them.

The incentives are perfectly aligned for all of us to absolutely hate interacting with call centers, especially automated ones.

This is only remotely true in the shithole that is US business culture.

In better places, among better people, you run a good call center because it improves your brand value, and helps people, and solves problems, and you started your business to make things for people or fix things for people.

Then some jackoffs on HN say that your country is "Dying" because it isn't minting any trillionaires.

One of the only non-local businesses that continues to be viewed positively (in my circles) in the US is Costco, who managed to align their incentives (mostly) with their customers by generating revenue from membership rather than product margin. I’ll admit that the layout of their stores is a bit anti-consumer, but that’s a minor transgression imo.

Their business model almost makes them more comparable to cooperatives rather than corporations.

I’m with you - I don’t think this is necessarily an issue with economic systems, but with culture. Specifically the culture that the wealthiest Americans have imposed upon the less wealthy.

This is grass greener logic.

Try cancelling a flight on British Airways months in advance.

Well maybe don't run the call center at all, and actually make things fixable yourself without interacting with a human/LLM.

Example: At least here in the US plenty of companies still require calling in to cancel. Include that by default as a user flow/feature (and we're getting better but many utility, gyms and other companies still require calls) and boom, you've gotten rid of probably 50+% of call volume in many places still requiring this.

But of course they want the best of both worlds as you describe. They want to inconvenience the hell out of you for things that are 100% able to be implemented as just regular user flows so they can get people to just drop it while also saving money on these flows with LLM's.

Statistically, customer service bots save a lot of time that humans spend on the customer service side. A lot of them are gathering basic form information that would take up more labor time. If you want more humans in customer service then you'll have to pay a lot more for it, one way or the other.

What call center have you reached where the agent had any decision power? What are you talking about?

Why would anyone need to make a call in such a LLM intermediated scenario? Your llm should talk to their llm. You really yearn for call centers just so the person stonewalling you can be a human paid minimum wage? Call centers are miserable, what satisfaction do you get from wanting humans involved in such a dystopian enterprise?

The deciding power they’re talking about is the power to decide to use or not use an LLM.

I mean they at least can afford to eat that way. I figure a solid portion, maybe the majority of the people who work in call centers are doing pretty much the cushiest job available to them.

The frontier companies are building agents to automate work end to end (i.e. with decision power)

The tech takes a while to diffuse like any other but I think call centers don't have a great outlook

I feel sorry for anyone that has to deal with account transfer due to end of life when working exclusively in LLM hell in your imagined world.

its not imagined, its already happening at scale in f500, the companies they work with to do this are going vertical

That does not reduce my sorrow for dealing with the complicated edge cases that need human intervention and don’t want to deal with hours and hours of arguing with an AI to try and get special-cased.

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