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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

We need a hard social stigma against allowing your AI agent to contact another human being on your behalf.

I'm looking for a contractor to do my concrete. 2 companies had AI agents. Instant no thank you, I'm just going to go with a guy that still answers his phone.

I try to warn my small business clients who ask for this.

You know those annoying AI bots the big companies use?

Well yours will be worse because you don't have their budget and it will drive what few customers who stumble upon your site away instantly.

Your own authentic voice answering a customer query directly is one of the few advantages a small business has over the big guys.

Not to mention liability if the agent says something misleading. You won't be able to afford the lawyers the big guys can to get yourself off the hook.

Most of those contractors have so much work that scaring away customers is a feature.

Then they can simply not pick up the phone.

This is something I've thought about as people complain about things like restaurant photos being AI and such. You know what kind of customer this pushes away? The kind that complain about minor details that don't really matter. Might be a net good for many businesses.

If you can't be bothered to get the minor details right, how can I be confident that you'll get the major ones right?

Alternatively: if you're wasting a bunch of your time on the minor details how do you have enough time for the major ones? I'd much rather my restaurant owner worry about sourcing ingredients, keeping the kitchen clean, improving the taste of the food than anything else.

If you don't have the time or money to have actual menu photos taken, what are the odds you have the time and money to source high quality ingredients, keep the kitchen clean, or improve the taste of the food?

The minor details are precisely the ones that require the least time and money to handle, so if those are being skimped on, it's likely that the major details are too, in my experience.

It depends, probably. If we are talking about high end, off the beaten path places, marketing is important. For the $1.50 slice pizza at the hole in the wall in Times Square? I doubt those places are cleaned and no one is checking the reviews, people just line up because others are, and because the smell and taste is right.

...so lack of attention to detail as evidence of a focus on meaningful quality?

Hell yeah I will ship you a box of ‘food’ for two hundred dollars. You know it’s going to be great because I don’t spend my time on stuff like describing or photographing it

Yeah! Restaurants, famously businesses who can lose customers with no downside and don't operate with a high chance of failure.

this is an idiotic take

My bet: it's less than a 2% loss in customers that are just very loud on the internet.

Given restaurant margins are in the single digit percentage points, even a 2% loss of customers could be a big deal.

To the people who are saying these little details aren't an indicator of what matters:

As a chef of close to a decade I will tell you right now:

If people in the restaurant aren't getting small details right...

They DEFINITELY aren't getting the rest right either

Someone who isn't paying attention to the food they're serving and the conditions they're serving it in just doesn't care and isn't paying attention to how they wash their hands or that piece of meat they dropped behind the fridge a few days ago that's bringing in roaches and rodents or the sour smell coming from the bag they just opened or the open wound that just dripped blood into your sauce

Most likely, they probably don't even know what allergens are present in their menu, posing a genuine risk to people

I promise you

Who are you people sticking up for?

I don't understand the "I mean they clearly didn't put any effort in here, but I believe 100% that they're doing their absolute best everywhere else!" sentiment

It's great to be optimistic about life and people in general but that's entirely unreasonable and you're only gonna be let down (or in the case of a restaurant probably get sick)

Would you trust a pilot that advertises his services with some half assed ai generated ad with spelling mistakes?

I know I wouldn't

There's a great episode from the Search Engine podcast about this. The gist is that it takes a lot of concerted effort to make something great, otherwise it will probably suck. The host got interested in a restaurant that seemed obsessive about doing things well and talked to the owner about it. The episode title is "How to pursue excellence ... in noodles".

>> You know what kind of customer this pushes away? The kind that

They are saying their belief about how other people act. I'm guessing they themselves do care.

People typically underestimate others. All too often bosses do. It's like the common belief that only other people respond to advertising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_effect

A prevalent problem everywhere: most dangerous in politics where we tend to call it hipocrisy.

Do they really? Are there any numbers available to support this? Sample size of one, but my brother is in that field, and it's been their and their subcontractors' slowest year in a long while.

I recently went contractor hunting and everyone was too busy and ignoring me. I did find one eventually but it took 5 days of calling 5-10 shops a day. How is your brother not also swamped with work?

Maybe tell him to get a sticker for the back of his truck and make sure he has a Google map listing with 2 photos of his work and a very basic website?

You're being extremely dismissive and you're denying somebody else's reality.

Demand varies a lot by location, type of contracting, price, etc.

Both you and I are, like I said, a sample size of one. You're drawing conclusions generalizing your 5 day experience looking for one type of work to an entire industry. He may not be in the same field you were looking for, or a different geographic reality. I also didn't say they weren't swamped with work, their schedule is full regardless, but that it's the lowest demand they've seen in a while.

Are you a contractor? In the current economy, it’s very hard to imagine this being true.

Where are you located? In the Northeast US, we're finding getting a contractor who is both good and has availability is quite an ordeal, involving significant delays.

The advise to do things that don't scale is more pertinent than ever.

No kidding. If they won’t pick up the phone to take my business, imagine when I’m calling after they already have my money.

Cue both of them sending you a weekly newsletter from now on, from which you can't unsubscribe from, for the next 30 years.

On the other hand, I am also looking for a contractor to do my concrete. I hate the whole process, I hate calling people only to spend 5 minutes trying to explain what I want and then they don’t provide that service or try to convince me to do something else, and then seeing bids and not really understanding what things are important and if I am getting a good price.

I would love for an agent to just be able to handle all this for me. Find me a good, fair price from a reliable contractor who understands what I want. I don’t want to have to call a bunch of people, just do it for me.

I tried seeing if an agent could help me with this, but it isn’t quite there yet. It did a good job helping me figure out what I really wanted, but not the rest of it.

I got quotes first which was the wrong approach. I ended up taking photos and detailing what I want on plat of survey. I also consulted a structural engineer(for garage cracks) and researched using rebar, fiber mesh, and metal mesh.

So, basically I know what I want and it is easier to get quotes this way. I just send the docs and dimensions.

> I also consulted a structural engineer

Well, now I have the same problem I had before, how do I find a good structural engineer, and what is a fair price to pay them? Do I have to call a bunch and do the same thing I hated doing for the contractors?

Fair point!

I would call 4 local structural engineers to you. Ask about price. Inspection and report is about $700-$2000. You just go with someone who feels right for you. Still cheaper than $40k concrete job, so not as much of a deal.

Yep. I had a recurring contract with a local service company that got bought out by a larger one. Old company had an email that I could message and immediately get a useful reply back from a human. New ownership got rid of that, and their website messaging didn't work. The only way to contact them was to call on the phone.

Who is the phone answered by? A crappy AI voice bot. Getting past that wasted a bunch of my time, followed by talking to person who was useless. Then I finally got through to someone who could actually do something for me. At that point the only help I wanted was to immediately close my account and never do business with them again.

Its annoying because thats what people want from small business but as a contractor you're usually working so you have to do your trade and be available to take calls like a receptionist. Better if they'd just send an email or use the online booking form.

I'm open to leaving voicemails. If I hear "hello, this is Bob from Bob's Concrete, I'm on a job leave a detailed message and I will get back to you", that guy is likely to get my job, even if he is a bit more.

Thats fair.

There are some businesses I don't want to contact anyone.

when finding an emergency plumber or a tow truck, it seems all the companies you can contact are just scummy intermediaries that call a normal business and take a cut.

I added emergency road service to my car insurance just so I wouldn't have to search for a tow company myself.

I've posted several reviews recently on Google, rating the company 1 star and warning that they're customer support is using AI agents that are unhelpful and try to waste your time. The other crazy thing is restaurants who use AI generated pictures in their marketing. Instant yuck.

Maybe. There are legitimate use cases. For example, data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable. There are startups that are using voice AI agents to call providers and ask them "hey are you still accepting these insurance plans?"

Obviously it would be great if the was a, ahem, legal consequence for not keeping this data up to date and available. But you know, if a frog had wings right?

That sounds like a terrible use-case unless there’s already a pre-existing relationship with the provider, and it seems questionable even then.

Clearly you've never had shitty insurance and a need for a doctor. I've spent multiple hours on the phone trying to find someone that takes my insurance. It's an actual problem.

It will be more of a problem if 100 idiotic startups are cold-calling doctors offices via their AI agents.

It’s already often difficult to get a human on the phone.

Sounds like the doc office should just list what they accept on their website then, god forbid.

It is absolutely a problem. One that will not be solved with LLMs.

I don't think the parent comment disagrees with it being a problem. I read it as more: the use of an agent doesn't resolve the ambiguity in the underlying problem but instead injects another variable that could further misrepresent whether the person has valid insurance coverage (e.g. hallucinating or misunderstanding the nature or extent of coverage).

I've spent multiple hours on the phone trying to find someone that takes my insurance.

Go to the insurance company web site.

Several years ago a law was passed requiring insurance companies to keep their provider lists accurate and up-to-date.

There's a regulatory window for freshness, and every insurance company web site is required by law to show you when the data was last updated.

How is that a legit case? The providers will hang up. The bot will take a maybe and assume yes. Why on earth would you trust this task to an agent when the consequences of a "my mistake you are absolutely right to call that out" could be hundreds of thousands of dollars?

You know, it's pretty funny that we currently live in a world where it's much safer to trust AI with medical diagnosis than it is to trust AI to find and schedule a doctor visit for a human medical diagnosis.

Not saying to trust AI medical diagnoses. But the difference in risk (chance of failure times cost of failure) is surprisingly large, and in the wrong direction.

> could be hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Did you know that there are many, many steps between "do you take this insurance" and then someone performing hundreds of thousands of dollars of procedures on you?

Did you know that just going to a hospital for an emergency without checking it was in network can run you a 100k bill even if they do nothing but MRI and monitoring performed for one night?

You’re going to hit your out-of-network out-of-pocket max well before that. Will still be a big bill, but if you’re dying you won’t have much of a choice.

In that case the startups should be able to defend themselves against the social stigma - "sure, there's a stigma against doing this, but here's why we think it's worthwhile anyway in this case".

For example, data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable. There are startups that are using voice AI agents to call providers and ask them "hey are you still accepting these insurance plans?"

Why are you assembling a list of what health plans different doctors take? That sounds like a spamhaus scraping the real world for leads.

Every health care provider in America will tell you the same thing: "Call your insurance company to verify coverage." Every insurance company in America will tell you, "Call us to verify coverage."

Nobody outside of the patient, the doctor, and the payor (insurance company) has a need to know those things. Your "AI agent" certainly does not.

Because I want to go to the doctor and I don't want to personally call n shithole private equity owned chain practices myself to find out if they take my insurance and are accepting new patients?

There are healthcare concierge services for this, my job offers one, which I use any time I need something like this.

You're going about it backwards.

Your insurance company has a list of the doctors who take your insurance. That's their job. They have people who do nothing but that every day for their work.

In your rush to be correct you seem to have missed the second sentence of my comment. I’m indeed using someone whose whole job is to do this.

lol same for me, I work for AssemblyAI

and still see when I call Dentist, they tell me check with health insurance and ask them add us to portal then I call Dentist again and then make an appointment.

This whole cycle needs to be automated and will be soon!!

> data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable

To fix the health care system is possible.

To use AI to circumvent it just creates an incentive to make it worse. You spend more on AI, insurance companies spend even more money in surveillance to know who you are and to make things more complicated. It is a escalation that just ends making you spend more money to stay the same.

Same here, I work for AssemblyAI and still encounter the same problem. When I call a dentist, they tell me to check with my health insurance and ask me to add us to the portal. Then I have to call the dentist again to make an appointment.

This entire cycle should be automated soon.

I already practice this. If you can't be bothered to construct a coherent sentence as a form of interpersonal communication, you can also go fuck yourself. Its beyond degrading.

Before anyone hits me with the "oh what about people who don't speak English" -- I legitimately don't care. I'd rather do the extremely human and now seemingly endearing ritual of trying to figure out what you're trying to say in our respectively broken interpretation of human language than read one sentence of Claudeisms.

Just have your agent answer their agent.

Yeah but you can’t blame an agent or emotionally abuse it…

They’re actually pretty susceptible to emotional abuse, it’s a decent prompt technique.

I don't have and don't want to have an agent

The rise in clearly agentic inbound spam hitting my inbox is insane.

It will mention some obscure internship fact from my LinkedIn, and then tie it to some perceived deficit with the product I'm working on.

I never thought I'd say this, but I miss the old automated spam.

social stigmas work locally, AI agents contact globally, there are only two ways social stigma is going to really work:

1. If an AI agent contacting people becomes big enough news that everybody the operator know reads about it. So AI agents asking people to send it child porn seems an unlikely edge case, but sure if that happens the person whose agent it is will get the social stigma.

2. If the AI agent accesses the owner's contacts list and starts asking for people to send it money so it can complete its task.

hard social stigmas just produce defiance and cheaters.

so, in other words, that seems like the way to breed more realistic acting agents rather than getting rid of them.

So what, just broadly accept less realistic acting agents and lower the cost for bad actors?

As long as they pay me, I have no problems with clients writing to me through any kind of third party agent, whether human or machine.

What does "contacting another human" actually mean when all of these messages are being answered by agents first? If I'm texting my friends and family I expect that to be answered by a human, but beyond that I am partially expecting it to be answered by an agent, and possibly routed to a human eventually.

I mean sending messages to someone who you know is a human being - a friend, a coworker, a subject-expert, a journalist.

If you know that you're messaging a non-human (or likely-non-human) then the social stigma shouldn't apply.

Are social stigmas as far as the internet goes doing any good?

I feel like they’re very much not.

I mean, I get your point, but at the same time, I'll happily send my AI agent to talk to support in trying to get them to honor their warranty. I shouldn't have to know case law and jurisdictional responsibility for them to do what they agreed they were going to do. And if I can have my AI agent do the brunt of that work and that heavy lifting, and I get what's owed to me, fine.

In that case the social stigma won't matter. Do you care if the support agents at faceless companies are annoyed with you?

A stigma should affect you when dealing with friends, business contacts, or anyone for whom the quality of your relationship is important going forward.

That's like saying don't agent your mom and dad. is anyone? A reprot for your boss? or code? we're past that.

Isn't that the ANTI AI SLOP policy?

Don't see it as any worse then copy paste outreach honeslty, just glad if people have more context on me before pursuiting

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