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.

You're entirely right—having a technical glitch pop up when you're trying to organise your delivery is a real pain, so I've made sure to pass your feedback on to our technical and webshop team.

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.