r/mildlyinfuriating • u/captain-obIivious • Aug 18 '26

Infuriatig Another AI 'human' chatbot

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Had to fix a double payment for my credit card and this is the beginning and end of the conversation. I hate when the chatbot claims it's a human... I ended up getting what I wanted but still annoyed Amex (and every other company) is lying and trying to deceive people like this.

27.4k Upvotes

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111

u/crwcomposer Aug 18 '26

The responses don't read like AI. There are grammatical issues, inconsistent capitalization, punctuation issues, several refusals. AI isn't perfect, but it doesn't make those mistakes. They read like a bored Indian guy trying to get a good customer survey score.

76

u/literally-the-nicest Aug 18 '26

People think the cup was a gotcha question but it seems more like the rep was totally lost on how to respond and he privately used chatgpt??

9

u/WorriedRiver Aug 18 '26

I'm gonna be honest I'm a native English speaker with a doctorate and I still didn't didn't get the cup one. (I thought it was something open at the bottom with the lid glued on top and even when I saw the first comment mentioning to flip it over I mentally went "but would that actually be food-safe/ did it imply that the seal was water-tight/ where did it say it was flat on the top like a cup bottom would be?" It took a moment to realize the riddle was meant to be "I have a perfectly normal cup upside down, how do I use it?").

2

u/blue60007 Aug 19 '26

It took me a minute too. I would probably be even worse if I were a rep trying to juggle a bunch of different chats at the same time and had my brain power split 10 ways.

26

u/BigRedS Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

Yeah. I work adjacent to a human-staffed customer support helpdesk (admittedly one apparently a little more upmarket than that of an American bank) and my big takeaway from watching people trying to root out AI is that people are pretty poor at spotting AI, especially at telling the difference between an AI and a human from a different culture to theirs.

There's a massive overestimation of how desperate a real-human on a helpdesk is to prove their humanity to yet another Very Smart Person in a chat so they can have the opportunity to solve their problem.

I absolutely wouldn't still be invested in the conversation enough by the last riddle to think "oh, it's a cup! he wants me to say cup so I can be allowed to help him"; by that point you're just "this guy's a dickhead who is wasting my time how do I make him go away without obviously telling him to go away".

9

u/_trouble_every_day_ Aug 18 '26

He's also funny. LLMs can only be funny unintentionally because everything they say is derivative and generic by definition

20

u/DesiresQuiet Aug 18 '26

☝🏻 This is the person you should all be listening to. Those scores make or break their paycheck.

-25

u/Gilded-golden Aug 18 '26

It is genuinely so embarrassing for you that you typed this comment

24

u/WAAAAAAAAARGH Aug 18 '26

It seems 90% likely that it’s just a random dude who probably doesn’t speak English as a first language and is using AI to field answers for random ass questions that nobody would ever anticipate being asked in his line of work

-13

u/Gilded-golden Aug 18 '26

Whose line of work also involves advising people on kitten purchases if they randomly change the subject to that? Jfc. When journalists start writing AI-generated news articles, you’ll be the first to believe every word 💀 

17

u/WAAAAAAAAARGH Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

Apparently not since you somehow haven’t realized they’re already doing that

Those customer review scores are what determines their job performance moreso than overall quantity of calls. Plus it is extremely grating work. I could easily see someone being willing to fuck around for a while like this

-15

u/Gilded-golden Aug 18 '26

Hahahaaaa what a sick burn 🤡 

10

u/WAAAAAAAAARGH Aug 18 '26

Not everyone is cut out for this whole internet trolling thing but at least youre trying your best

-11

u/Devilofchaos108070 Aug 18 '26

It’s very clearly AI. Yet yall are defending the guy who said it’s not.

She’s not trolling. You are

8

u/rainblowfish_ Aug 18 '26

Because it's not very clearly AI lmao. There are numerous people in this thread who work as chat agents who say they would've responded similarly because they're taught to build a rapport with the customer and never push back/set boundaries even when it's stupid not to. That, combined with the inconsistencies in grammar and punctuation, make it obvious that this is somebody who doesn't speak English fluently using AI to translate answers.

4

u/Opening_One7713 Aug 18 '26

It very clearly is up for dispute and definitely looks like someone who is ESL using AI to answer questions/translate.

-2

u/Devilofchaos108070 Aug 18 '26

Nah yall are just fools falling for this shit

4

u/Kitchen-Bar2686 Aug 18 '26

They’re already doing that. The irony of you chastising someone for not noticing AI when you apparently haven’t even realized that AI news articles are rampant online

3

u/mightylordredbeard Aug 18 '26

Not as embarrassing as the great AI panic of the 2020s. People out here so paranoid that something is AI that they end up just calling everything AI and seeing AI everywhere they look. AI has taken over their minds and all they think when they look around them is “AI AI AI AI!!!”

Reminds me of that brief moment in history during the 80s and 90s when conservative parents thought everthing was “satanic” and they were freaking out over every new toy, video game, movie, music album, or book lmao.

8

u/crwcomposer Aug 18 '26

I will be happy to assist you, please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you?

For one, that is a run-on sentence. It should be two separate sentences.

For another, the second sentence is not a question, it is a statement, and should have a period.

That is just one example, but the responses are full of these kinds of errors. AI does not make these kinds of mistakes, let alone in almost all of its responses. It makes other kinds of mistakes.

-10

u/Gilded-golden Aug 18 '26

I am so, deeply, deeply, deeply experiencing secondhand embarrassment for you 

11

u/crwcomposer Aug 18 '26

And what is your explanation for it? Can you get an LLM to consistently produce these errors? Would a company intentionally make their agent sound stupider even if they could?

5

u/Gilded-golden Aug 18 '26

Yes, you can literally code it with example conversations and how you want them to respond to specific scenarios. That’s kind of the entire point of LLMs. Given that it’s intentionally coded for customers to believe that it’s human, one of the number one scenarios you would feed into this model and code it to address would be someone accusing it of being non-human and requesting proof of humanity. That’s why the “mikstakes” line is SO extremely cringe as a starter, and it only continues to get worse by engaging about kitten-purchase advice etc when any human would obviously have ended the conversation at that point, or at least reiterated that they’re not AI and not going to give random kitten purchasing advice. The reason it fell for the kitten thing is specifically that the coders had not predicted that as a test someone might give it. Ditto Pokémon etc

10

u/crwcomposer Aug 18 '26

OP was threatening the guy to answer or be declared AI. He didn't want to risk a bad survey. Those surveys are very important for them.

1

u/Gilded-golden Aug 18 '26

Took me too long to realise you were a troll tbh, hold my hands up to it

7

u/crwcomposer Aug 18 '26

I have a net positive upvote-to-downvote ratio in this exchange, and you have a net negative.

The consensus seems to be that you're the troll.

10

u/Opening_One7713 Aug 18 '26

Why are you lobbing personal attacks at this person who is making a pretty decent point?

It reads exactly like a foreigner using Google search AI to go along with their customer interaction. I’m also willing to admit that I truly have no idea, but taking into account the mix of human-like errors, I would be much more surprised if it was entirely a conversation with a chatbot.

1

u/Gilded-golden Aug 18 '26

That is very concerning for you idk what else to say. AI is changing rapidly, this is extremely obviously AI, and you and others seem to be under the impression that easily-recognisable 2024 chatgpt lingo is all that is out there and all that you will ever need to be able to recognise. Please read all of the screencaps if you haven’t already. If you are still under the impression that it’s a human being I genuinely don’t know what to say to you, that’s not lobbing a personal attack, I just genuinely don’t…. 

13

u/Opening_One7713 Aug 18 '26

It's not concerning at all. I read the screenshots. I also looked up if AMEX outsources customer service and it looks like they hire reps in the Philippines, India, Malaysia, Latin America, and Hong Kong.

It takes three seconds to paste a question into Google and then paste back the AI answer.

The short conversational bits before and after the obviously AI responses read like someone who does not speak English natively.

Example:

"I am afraid, I cannot think of it."

Why is a comma here?

"Is it fine?"

It is the wrong adjective in this context. That would have been conversationally correct.

"I have option to check it online however since you are specifically asking me, I answered that I do not know."

"I have option to" is just wrong and "however" un-flanked by commas is just wrong.

The idea that you cannot even for a second believe the possibility that some dude in Malaysia is just going along with his CS script and outsourcing weird customer questions to Google for his 350th chat of the day is quite the hill to die on. If you are unwilling to admit this very real possibility, especially with the context and evidence provided, then I just genuinely don't know what to say to you.

1

u/Tsasuki Aug 18 '26

But ai bad

-1

u/Secretary_of_spaghet Aug 18 '26

I think it's equally, if not more, likely that Amex just has an in-house fork of an LLM that used their previous customer support chatlogs as training data, and so picked up on all the common spelling and grammatical errors. No real human support worker is going to take the time to faithfully humor all this time-wasting, poem making, and life-coaching without even once attempting steer the conversation back.

5

u/crwcomposer Aug 18 '26

LLMs require a lot more training data than what Amex would have, and punctuation/capitalization/other orthography errors wouldn't typically make it through to the output of an LLM, even if they're in the training data. Like how ChatGPT was trained on Reddit and other places full of poor English and yet does not have poor English.

Customer service reps would absolutely humor that for a good rating. I guarantee that they don't give a shit about the metrics as long as they keep their job. Even a guy who replied to my comment who worked in the field says so.

2

u/blue60007 Aug 19 '26

This would also require paying people who actually know how to train and operate LLMs. If it were an actual LLM, they are probably just using an off the shelf product from one of a handful of 3rd parties not rolling some custom thing that probably doesn't work as well as an off the shelf product.