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Business owner 'hires' ChatGPT for customer service, then fires the humans (nationalpost.com)

submitted 9 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[-] Shialac@lemmy.world 80 points 9 months ago

I fucking hate capitalism and its demand that everyone has to work a fulltime job.

Job automation could and should be a good thing. We as a society should aspire to get rid of as many work hours as possible to actually do the things we like. Instead we are being forced to do shittier and shittier things because we are nothing more than slaves to some billionaires

[-] honey_im_meat_grinding@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Back in the good old days of the Stone Age we used to work 4-6 hours per day, based on the anthropological evidence we have (as Historia Civilis points out[1]). That seems to be the amount of work humans naturally slot into when left alone. Instead we work 8+ hours per day per 5 day work week. In European countries like the Netherlands, and the Nordics, for example, that's slightly below 7 hours per day (on average, assuming a 5 day work week), so they're getting close to the range we used to work. But a 4 day work week still seems like an almost utopian idea to achieve politically, despite all the insane productivity gains we've made over the last 100 years thanks to automation that makes even a four day work week seem laughable - we should probably be thinking of a three day work week at this point.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo

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[-] assassinatedbyCIA@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

‘All billionaires’

[-] Nindelofocho@lemmy.world 32 points 9 months ago

“ Suumit Shah never liked his company’s customer service team. His agents gave generic responses to clients’ issues. Faced with difficult problems, they often sounded stumped, he said.”

my brother in christ thats a you/your company problem and an example of absolute failure to train

[-] DudeDudenson@lemmings.world 14 points 9 months ago

I've worked in a call center for 3 years and I can tell you hating your employees is an industry culture thing

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 3 points 9 months ago

As is a great deal of corporate nepotism.

A lot of the managers come from their own middle management layer employee stock who have absolutely no idea how the technical aspects of the product work, so inevitably you end up with the lazy leading the blind.

[-] JayDee@lemmy.ml 30 points 9 months ago

You don't see calligraphist or scribe as regular jobs anymore. It's because the automated systems we created via typewriters and text editors were sufficient to replace them wholesale.

Sometimes jobs getting automated does not create sustainable jobs to replace them. That's just going to happen more often as time goes on.

[-] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 21 points 9 months ago

Which is just another reason upon the mountain of reasons that capitalism is a terrible system and cannot be allowed to continue

[-] nudnyekscentryk@szmer.info 15 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

While I agree with the anti-capitalist sentiment, your anger is misaimed. Forcibly keeping nonprofitable jobs which are easily replaceable by AI is contrary to contemporary marxian-derivative theories (see Bullshit jobs by David Graber). We, as a society should seize technical advancements such as AI and automation to let people work less while allowing them to afford life. Thus contemporary economists and modern monetary theories are more and more open to the idea of universal basic income.

[-] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 13 points 9 months ago

See my other response, your take is the same as mine and I'm not sure how it got misinterpreted.

Under capitalism automation hurts the working class and enriches the elite even more.

Under a socialist system automation would be celebrated as less work for society and the displaced workers would have no panic about not paying the bills while they find a more needed way to help society.

[-] nudnyekscentryk@szmer.info 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yeah I see your other comment now. I think the reason me and !bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works misunderstood your point is that the original comment you replied to said:

Sometimes jobs getting automated does not create sustainable jobs to replace them. That’s just going to happen more often as time goes on

to which you replied:

Which is just another reason upon the mountain of reasons that capitalism is a terrible system and cannot be allowed to continue

implying you oppose technological advancements of any sort if they create risk to peoples' jobs.

[-] bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works 0 points 9 months ago

You think we should stop innovating so that call centre jobs are protected?

Weird take.

[-] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 10 points 9 months ago

You misunderstand my take.

Automation should be a GOOD thing.

But we live in a system in which you must work or starve. Automation takes away jobs faster than we can replace them (with equally or better paying jobs the displaced workers are qualified for).

Under a better system we would see automation as slightly less work for society with no drop in quality of life or even a rise in quality of life, while the displaced workers will have no mad scramble to be retrained before they can't pay rent.

[-] bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works -1 points 9 months ago

We've yet to run out of jobs, and life is measurably better for the vast majority of people compared to just a hundred years ago.

There is actually a shortage of labour in major economies

[-] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 3 points 9 months ago

In terms of medically and technologically? Sure. I'd hands down rather be an average person today than in 1860 or whatever.

In terms of say, home ownership, age of retirement, weight, social life, financial security, time off, etc - things that actually make our now longer lives fufilling - how have those trended in the western world since say, the 40's?

If I took just one average job of these so many "available", could I support kids and have financial security in decent housing?

[-] bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works -4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

https://80000hours.org/2023/02/is-the-world-getting-better-or-worse/

High paying jobs go to highly skilled workers. If you want to earn more, learn more.

If you live in Germany, I'd say yes. Their home ownership levels are one of the lowest yet they are the richest in Europe and there are plenty of technical jobs that pay extremely well.

We are at a tipping point again where companies have had too much benefit from the productivity of labour. That balance will shift with more employees taking direct action, the same as it always does.

[-] Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world 0 points 9 months ago

Hope you like your life. If everyone goes and gets a "high" paying job. No nurses doctors psychology counselling teachers fruit pickers cleaners garbage collectors civil servants police ambulance.

Your ignorance if woeful. We don't need 8 billion devs, bankers degenerate gamblers CEOs coders and aresholes. We need face to face people doing jobs only humans can do.

Stick your rich list up your ass

[-] bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Their wages haven't beaten inflation, now they're on strike.

I suggest you read up on the energy shock of the 1970s, it's very similar.

No need to be rude, cunt.

[-] Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

I know a lil bit about it. But how does that change what I said ? Who's on strike ? Lots of places are striking.

Because inflation and bubbles are starting to break. Hopefully will be a full meltdown soon. Gotta change the system.

Fair enough. You just seem entitled and I hate that. But fair. Gid cunt or bad ?

[-] heyspencerb@sh.itjust.works 2 points 9 months ago

Totally agree. That’s the same way I feel about Uber Drivers. I’ve used Waymo and it’s amazing, better than the average Uber driver I’ve had. It’s a bad job that doesn’t pay enough, and while I hope those drivers are able to move on to better things, it’s a job that should disappear. If we wanted to protect jobs we should have kept the union Taxi Drivers. The current system just grids up poor people for Uber’s profit

[-] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 28 points 9 months ago

I'm actually very torn on this. On the one hand, it will suck for customers with real problems to have to deal with poor customer service.

On the other hand, I work in IT. Most people call in with the stupidest questions that can be easily answered by a bot or by simply not being an idiot. And it really sucks to have someone intelligent deal with those questions 100 times a day.

[-] neptune@dmv.social 10 points 9 months ago

Ideally robots would do all the shit jobs no one wants to do like sweep floors and tier 1 IT support. Then, hopefully, we could all get UBI and decide if we want to design and repair robots, or make bespoke jam, or do some other job robots generally can't do. Alas.

[-] funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 6 points 9 months ago

I was on a bot chat the other day. "I have super admin permissions but it wont let me switch XYZ toggle."

It said "I don't understand this, can you rephrase?"

I said, "I can't switch Xyz toggle despite having admin permissions."

"I don't understand can you rephrase"

"no."

"connecting you to a real person"

[-] stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca 5 points 9 months ago

Agreed, though as a customer my biggest pet peeve is having to talk to someone because the functionality is inexplicably not available on their website. If having a chat bot to do this gets around the issue I'm all for it.

A good example even before the whole LLM boom is that one of the couriers in my country (Purolator) implemented a truly useful chat bot a few years ago. I can do all kinds of stuff with it that you would have to call any other courier to get done, such as update my address to let the driver know a buzzer number.

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The article only slightly touched on this, but the incoming LLM customer service chatbots are going to absolutely fucking suck, just like outsourcing all the call centers made customer service actually a lot worse, not because people farther away are worse at customer service or anything, but because companies created rigid systems and scripts to remove any agency from its agents. It's now common for these outsourced call centers to have an initial layer of absolutely useless positions who are only allowed to do a few things, and then they have to escalate to a "supervisor," who is clearly just an agent with slightly more privileges, and this continues recursively forever. All this does is make the call last forever, but hey, they save some money, and customers like you and me are forced to spend an hour plus on the phone any time we have a problem with any large company.

Capitalist job replacement isn't a one-for-one. So long as it makes more profits to do it, they will, even if it makes the service suck. When I have a problem, I need a person with some understanding and agency to resolve it on the other end. LLMs don't know anything. Even a semi-fluent person with no admin privileges is so much more useful than an LLM. These companies are going to fire all these workers and make customer service an absolute fucking nightmare.

tl;dr capitalism uses computers backwards

[-] SARGEx117@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

And if you support my bid for president, I will require every business over 50 employees to have a corporate office in every state they do business in (two on the extra large ones) , so no matter where you live, you can yell at someone face to face instead of into a phone with nobody listening.

That's it. That's my whole platform. No plans, just this.

[-] greybeard@lemmy.one 3 points 9 months ago

I'm a fan of doing business locally for this reason. People tend to treat you better when they know if they piss someone off enough that person could take a baseball bat to their car. Joking aside, small local companies tend to care about reputation. You are 1 of 1,000, not 1,000,000. Your money constitutes a significant portion of their profits. Unfortunately, it seems like every day there are less small businesses to do business with.

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago

And CEOs must make themselves personally available to angry customers for a minimum number of hours per week.

[-] SARGEx117@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

3 MONTHS MANDATORY CUSTOMER SERVICE AT VARIOUS STORES EVERY YEAR

doesn't have to be all at once, but it DOES have to equal 3 months. And they have to get high customer satisfaction surveys like everyone else

[-] Nommer@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 months ago

I had to pay a small medical bill once and everytime I called it would take me to an answering machine after 2 or 3 minutes. They would call back after 1 or 2 hours and by that time I'm usually at work so I couldn't answer my phone since I'm driving. I just ended up giving up and stopped trying to pay it. IDK what happened to it.

[-] theterrasque@infosec.pub 1 points 9 months ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/16luf4o/an_ai_phone_call_api_powered_by_chatgpts_api_this/

Sorry, don't have a different link for the video. But if that's a real demo...

[-] theluddite@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months 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.

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 8 points 9 months ago

This reads like a onion article

this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023

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