I recently tried to reach a customer support rep at a large social media company—one you’ve heard of but that I won’t name. Our advertising account had been disabled when someone tried to hack into our social media manager’s account. Predictably, it was a fiasco. The ad account was disabled automatically by an algorithm, and after weeks of back and forth, nobody in the company seemed to know why it happened or how to fix it. As I write this article, our digital ads on that platform are still disabled.
I was initially optimistic. I opened a support ticket and had a conversation with a chat bot. Anyone who has tried to get support from a web chat bot knows what an inauspicious start that was, but when I asked to talk to a human, I was pleasantly surprised to be connected almost immediately.
Stephanie was unfailingly polite and diplomatic, empathetic, and supportive. But as we chatted, I had a growing feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Stephanie seemed to forget the context of the conversation every few exchanges, asked multiple times to confirm the account numbers, and used diplomatic language that sounded great but meant nothing. She couldn’t tell me what was actually happening but assured me that “the team” (whoever that is) was working ever so hard to resolve the issue. That was a month ago.
It suddenly hit me that I almost definitely wasn’t talking to a human. I can’t prove it, but I’ve spent enough time tinkering with large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to pick up on their eccentricities. I think that this company pretended to connect me with a human but sent me instead to a modern AI.
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