Business owner ‘hires’ ChatGPT for customer service, then fires the humans::Experts divided on whether a new wave of call centre automation will make for better jobs for people, or merely throw millions out of work

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      1 year ago

      Even if that’s a real demo, I still have two thoughts.

      First, the technical capacity of it has nothing to do with our user experience. Indian people are just as good at delivering customer service as Americans are, yet when we outsource customer service, we make it worse.

      Second, even in that demo, the chat bot didn’t do anything. I very rarely call customer service for technical support. When I call, I normally need specific answers to me, or actions from the company, like a flight change, or an explanation for a charge I don’t understand, or to coordinate warrantied repairs on something I just bought, etc. Notice that all the information the chatbot gave was general-purpose, googlable stuff. Companies aren’t going to let their chatbots change your flight for you or whatever. What’s going to happen is we’re going to have to deal with an LLM that can’t actually resolve our problems, and convince it to go fetch a human.