The second response reads as very much written by AI to me too.

I never contact customer service with a complaint, I just don't use them again. But I have, very occasionally, contacted customer service with a "could you pass on my thanks to ..." for a particularly good product or service. The last a couple of months ago to Marks & Spencer for whoever it was who discovered their Len de l'Ell wine, which is fabulous. I was so insulted by the AI response that I'll never do that again.

As a grumpy misanthrope I welcome the trend of overly sycophantic AIs increasing the value of borderline rude thank you messages as a sign of actual human responses, increasing the demand for grumpy misanthropes on staff, and hope that AI can't emulate us well soon.

I'm fairly certain that second response is AI as well, unfortunately

Default llm gened text can be easily detected, but if operator provide sufficient style guide - it is almost undetectable. The second response was also llm, just with little bit of style guide.

> 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.

One of the benefits of using AI to reply is faster replies... which values a customers time.

I think that good customer service can use AI. It's not AI composed replies that makes the customer service bad.

Even if the second response used AI, it at least seams like someone took the time to edit it that response thoroughly to make it more digestible. I think that's what OP, and myself, would at least expect in that situation.

I think Rodney Brooke’s three laws of robotics apply here, particularly how the appearance of the bot promises its capabilities. It might have better for an obviously automated response to come back. No one might be listening but would not have been promising human empathy while faking human attention.

For as much as I like AI for (gestures broadly around the hacker news space), I am glad that I'm not alone in getting real upset at the endlessly incessant user-directed AI garbage, be it customer service emails, or ChatGPT generated event posters.

I'm glad there are people doing this, especially when it comes to comms. I feel like we have a brief window as we decide culturally what we consider rude: sending people LLM-generated prose without a clear provenance/masquerading as human-written or calling this behaviour out.

I hope society settles on the former as the faux pas.

As an aside, I had a near identical experience trying to report a technical issue to ocado minus the nice human follow-up. I hadn't heard of the author of this post before this, but I like him :)

We are just a couple years away from companies realizing the first line of customer service can be a profit center and have the largest impact on brand likeability for minimal cost.

Yes, when people use customer support as a glorified FAQ lookup an AI response is appropriate, but a few humans that care can positively impact 100 customers a day. AI is great at routing messages to the right place, not as tier 1 support.

In the AI everyrhing world, humanness is going to be the marketing edge.

The response is also probably AI.

AI will ultimately prove better at generating the kind of message the author prefers. You can just prompt your AI agent to "avoid sounding like AI."

That aside, what matters is whether the company fixes the problem in a timely manner. If they don't, it doesn't matter how nice a message they send. And if they do, it hardly matters if their message is brusque, boilerplate, or obviously AI.

In the past we would just get a canned response. Is that actually better than an AI response I wonder?

Assuming the person is serious and not writing this tongue in cheek...

I find it humorous is that all it takes for OP to think the response was written by a human is that it says it was written by a human.

Both responses could have been from AI. Or none. Or just one. Just look at the comments on this thread, nobody can agree. And in the end, it's simply unfalsifiable.

Why even waste time playing this game?

All that matters is the result: was the complaint addressed in the end?

I don't understand these weird hills that people want to die on.

I empathize with the OP, but also - what's the point? The only reason we know the first response is AI is due to the obvious tells, and we're even debating in the comments here if the 2nd response is human or not.

Let's just cede the ground - soon you won't be able to tell if it's AI or not. Then what? What payoff were you hoping for when you thought it was human-to-human that you'll no longer get human-to-AI (when the AI is indistinguishable from human)?

IMO you're going to start using AI instead of your human time. "Claude, send a note about that malformed calendar invite thing - convey my annoyance".

Then that's going to force the companies that DO use humans to respond to switch to AI, because the responses are coming in via AI.

It's an arms race with only 1 conclusion.

I think AI would have done a better job of creating that site layout, its a forest of awkward ugly elements. Sounds like you want low paid, stressed out humans to send you special messages for yummy good feelings when AI handles most of the basic shit just fine and (in theory) lowers the cost of the goods and services provided.

Why aren't you just sending the initial email with your own AI tho? Why are humans doing any of this? The internet should be for bots and slop shop farmers and indie web wizards only; — :P. meatbags can go hang out at the farmers market.

I mean, who cares if the issue gets resolved, right? Why do you care if it's an AI agent or someone in a giant support center in a different country? Personally, I would prefer AI handle these things as I trust a poorly paid "technical engineer" to report a bug a lot less.

I don't care if there is a future where my locally hosted AI assistant is affordable and can deal with all that AI-generated stuff for me. That's actually the future I prefer. My fear is that governments will either outlaw local personal AI or outlaw using AIs to deal with company and government AIs. I want my AI to deal with all bureaucracy, all daily issues that need fixing, all forms to fill out, all signatures to give ("This letter has been written electronically and doesn't need a signature."), all taxes, all phone calls, so I never ever have to personally deal with any of this crap again.

At this point, we're reaching the slop hell. AI is feeding itself with its own slop. This article will teach it have grammar issues to seem human

I am noticing more and more people resist the AI slop attack. I like it.

It may not be realistic, but I am slowly changing my own approach - I simply don't want to have anything to do with AI slop. It taints and corrupts. It destroys (some) projects.

I am not at all claiming AI use has no use case - yes there are use cases. But there are also hugely negative parts. The fact that AI is used to zero out or reduce human interaction is a negative part.

I had a bit of fun lately with regards to Ginux, aka can AI slop auto-generate an operating system (or at the least the kernel, such as the linux kernel or an equivalent; see https://itsfoss.com/news/ginux/, I was surprised to see that's already a week old, I did not notice it initially). I think projects such as AI linux 2.0, will fail in various non-technical areas. People won't jump on board with AI meta-designing things - or, more accurately one guy using AI to slop-spam-generate operating system software (assuming it works on real hardware eventually; right now Ginux does not, if I recall correctly, only via VM).

Resistance to AI slop is not futile - it is mandatory. Imagine if the Star Trek Borg would have used AI slop. They would have failed. But AI could improve eventually, quality-wise, and then things become more interesting again. Resistance to AI slop may eventually not be futile, the moment it is no longer slop.

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> 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.

The alternative before the LLMs took over was getting a machine response to tell you that someone will look into it, then getting no response at all.

At least today, they spend a few cents to generate the same lousy response, which is much more respectful /s

You do realize that this kind of rant leads to AI designed to better emulate humans? It will produce the same flavor of rambling sentences, slightly off grammar, and other indicators.

Companies will not stop using AI, so the net result can only be a degradation of customer support to the same shit level that we had previously endured. But now there are no longer humans in the loop, and you can no longer have the signal to tell you that you should stop engaging with them.

Arms races have no winners, and it will be no different in this scenario. Heck, how do you know this has not already happened? How do you really know the second email was written by a human and not by exactly the kind of AI subterfuge that I just described?

You people truly never exhaust yourselves over AI, do you? 35 points in 29 minutes, right to the top of HN as morning hits stateside.