I scheduled an apartment viewing recently, and the only method they provided to do so was chatting with an AI (seriously)... I then tried and failed to find a way to contact a human for confirmation multiple times. Lo and behold nobody at the leasing office when I showed up at the scheduled time. Came back later and eventually found somebody - they had not seen anything I'd done with the bot.
Software for small businesses and local governments is often really bad and I'd much prefer to make sure a person knows what I'm trying to get accomplished.
I got to talk to one of the leasing managers at one of the viewings and I told him it made them seem cheaper, not more tech-savvy. He told me they had spent millions of dollars on it.
I called their office and after 20 minutes of trying to go around their obnoxious automated phone menu's I finally got someone who informed me who said they don't use THAT app any more to schedule appointments I need to use their NEW app and sent me a totally different app link in an email. I told them they are probably losing a ton of business because very clearly the OTHER app is still very much out in the wild and still very much being used.
I went with a different company and had much better luck.
Support from days gone by was not perfect (hold times, support reading off a script)but it was often a nice option.
First of all, understand that many especially smaller companies have people who has the job of answering phone calls. Rather than doing a multi day back and forth via email or chat where you're one out of five that "agent" is currently servicing, calling is really really efficient. Clarification and confirmations are instant, alternatives can be quickly discuses. I call because it's efficient.
Also, have you ever noticed that most people SUCK at email? Try sending an email to company with two or more questions. What will happen is that you'll get an answer for the first question and then they forget about the rest. The larger the company the more likely this is to happen, because they can deal with three issues in one support ticket, at least that's my theory. So now you need three email.
I used to hate calling people, but I found that I hated uncertainty more and I hate getting wrong half answers to my questions. Calling people fixes all of this. Always call, but get confirmation in writing.
For example, I can call a local store and ask "hi, do you have this item in stock, can you check on the shelf and set it aside for me please, I will be there in 25 mins".
By contrast stuff like "click and collect" order flows online are super rigid.
Thanks to AI, you will speak to who you think is a "real person"...
I remember, some time ago, some scammer tried to get my wife to address an "urgent bank issue."
What tipped her off, was how incredibly good their "tech support" was.
I do not mind a phone call when I am the one initiating and hence, I know the context of it and the expectations.
Time to go outside more :)
If you have minimal to zero scruples, this seems to be an easy market to make a start up in. Landlords will buy anything!
Was it RealPage? I hear they're illegally colluding to raise prices.
Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers. They don't even have a real number to play a recorded message affirming that there is no ability to call.
ETA: For instance, I notice Facebook appears to own the typo squat `facrbook.com`. I feel like it's the same principle, though I assume toll free numbers are more expensive.
If you can't provide their AI with text answering their direct question (eg, "what is the support number for Facebook"), they'll find a document which does provide such text. If it's not you then it's a scammer or competitor. UX for these customers means presenting information in a way that sorts high in a semantic search and is robust to transformation.
If you provide text indirectly answering the question ("that number doesn't exist" rather than a literal number), you're liable to be scored as less relevant than a wrong but direct answer ("the number is 1555 SCAMMER"). You're also less robust to transformations, because you can't pull a valid phone number out of the text.
Or maybe I'm wrong, take any certainty implied by my language as rhetorical. That's just the pattern I'm seeing in these tea leaves.
Contrast with Experian, which has a number for consumers to call, but actually has an elaborate infinite loop in its phone tree that prevents you from actually talking to a human (this is by design).
If you're one of their customers (read: a business paying for their service), there's support you can call, but for individuals who have issues with their online Experian account or credit report, you can't, even if you're a paid subscriber to their consumer-oriented credit reporting services.
Frankly it's absurd to me that it's legal to do so. Any public facing company that is sufficiently large should be required by law to operate a phone service where you can talk to a real human being.
All of these huge mega corps are run with absolute impunity and there is often absolutely 0 avenue for regular everyday people to get in touch when they have issues. They direct you in these endless loops to FAQ's and "Community Resources"; even getting an email address is like getting blood from stone sometimes.
Mealy-mouthed corporate lying horeshit.
They are able, just unwilling.
If free-market libertarianism is as great as the tech bros want us to think, why do these companies lie so much and so often despite the need for participants in the market to be correctly and full informed so they can make rational decisions?
I suspect the helpful SEO guy who posted this answer was trying to get more visibility on Quora so answered many questions automatically or semi-automatically without verifying anything.
This is the beginning of the post:
Ruhul Alom
Social Media Marketer at Social MediaAuthor has 2.9K answers and 1M answer views6mo
My dear !
Yes, 1-844-457-1420 is a valid Facebook support phone number. It is a toll-free number that is available 24/7. You can call this number to get help with a variety of Facebook issues, such as:
Resetting your password
Logging in to your account
Recovering a hacked account
[...]You can use the LLMs for language understand and interpreting questions, but the would need access to databases containing authoritative answers and not answer anything for which they don't have an answer.
He then called me and I tried to find the official Amazon-Hotline on amazon.de. Since I was unable to find it I had to asked a search engine. The only results where third-party sites. It where from journalistic magazines I recognize (like chip.de) but still yet another gamble.
But I guess you can't expect a tiny startup like Facebook to invest money into having 1 employee part-time tweaking the prompt of the chatbot to respond appropriately to commonly recurring user questions.
After SEO we'll get AIO.
Same with prompt injection by malware.
I believe the heart of the problem is that corporations are riding a hype wave as long as they can, and an AI chat looks like super convincing, next level stuff thanks to the simple interface that hides the fact that you cannot communicate with this one as you would with a human being. You use natural language and it responds with natural language, which makes it not only convenient, but also dangerous.
There's money to gain on all this. While at the same time, hallucinations are an unsolved problem as well as making AI humble enough to realize and tell users that they just don't know. The combination of hallucinating, raising convincing arguments, being confidently incorrect, and not knowing the boundaries of your knowledge base, is a terrible one to let loose as officially sanctioned products.
I was listening to a debate on a podcast a while ago and one of the debaters kept saying, “Well, according to ChatGPT, […]”—it was incredibly difficult listening to her repeatedly use ChatGPT as her source. It was obvious she genuinely believed ChatGPT was reliable, and frankly, I don’t blame her, because when LLM’s hallucinate, they do so confidently.
He's speaking the truth.
Google has, for a long while now, let scammers just buy advertisements to get their fake scam page to the top of the results. And not just major banks, various open source software have been subject to this exact attack.
It's imperative for security that you install adblockers on all their devices.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
According to Google: the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.
Even though they wouldn't know the term, we all learn how to figure out what's true and what's not: we learn it when watching cartoons about lying, or when interpreting texts in school and so on. But imagine you go to a doctor, and have a small talk in which you say "I was always fascinated by medicine", to which the doc responds "What is medicine?" - you probably would run away from that doctor.
And yet here we are, living in the "Information Era", and yet we're still missing the very basic techniques of figuring out the truth: if you look at the statistics of religion/atheism, no group holds over 50% of population - meaning THE MAJORITY IS WRONG - and not on a nuanced thing like the majority not being able to tell the average distance between the Earth and the Moon with 1 meter accuracy. No, on something as important and world-view defining as the existence and character of God, most of us are wrong.
The percentage of flat-earthers in America is a 2-digit number...
So the problem here isn't that Facebook doesn't have a support number. The problem is much deeper, and in a way, it's good that people suffer from their stupidity: it's like programmers suffering from errors - in the end of the day they end up with their logical thinking improved. Question is: how do we reshape the society to replace production errors with compilation errors, or how do we educate ourselves to minimize the frustrating error messages.
"Not helping" seems a wild understatement. "Deceiving people into taking the wrong frame" seems more accurate.
LLMs are as trustworthy as humans.
Humans have been being wrong for about as long as we have been lying.
Whether you get information from a human or an LLM, check it.
I worry about the people who insist on credible sources rather than checking information for themselves. I think 80% or more of them are trolling me, but there are some who genuinely do not apply the Scientific Method to check facts in their everyday life. I truly feel sorry for them.
I'm curious if a Canadian court would hold Meta liable for the man's losses in this case as well.
This FB thing is a case of an LLM simply hallucinating without direct human intervention.
Very different cases from a computer science perspective. My hope is that legally, they don't get viewed differently.
If you outsource functions of your business to a third party contractor you are still responsible for what they do and say. I don't think we should allow companies to weasel out of their obligations because they were dumb enough to let a sentence generator loose in a way that it could make commitments.
StackOverflow gets lots of fake posts like this promoting numbers. Around tax time there's a lot of Quicken ones.
Quora doesn't even pretend to police this kind of thing. Automated moderation might remove it, only after it has been reported. There's far, far too much of it for users to report all of it.
Nobody pays attention to it on Quora, but it's clear that it's out there to poison AI and search engines.
That, and the fact that LLMs are now available to pretty much anyone for effectively nothing, would make me very cautious in basing my judgement of something being a scam or not exclusively on a caller's accent, spelling, mannerisms etc.
Lately, it's actually been quite the opposite in my experience, and I don't find that too surprising either: A lucrative scam business can afford to pay much more than the average US company that sees customer support as a cost center to be optimized at any cost. So why wouldn't their staff's English be better?
Social engineering scams are about to become a lot more exciting (in a bad way), not least thanks to LLMs (with and without voice capability), and I think people are absolutely not ready for it, not even us professionals working in tech.
I'm only sorta kidding. I am surprised at the number of people who are comfortable with such a shallow conclusion.
b) Windows Recall data is never going to make its way into public models.
It doesn't need to. It just needs to make its way into OpenAI's models, which it will.
I think in an ideal world, you could use speech recognition to let people leave a message, and open a ticket, as if they had emailed support@. When someone responds, the system gives them a call them back and delivers it using text to speech.
All you'll find is results like https://gethuman.com/phone-number/Facebook or https://facebook-pay.pissedconsumer.com/customer-service.htm... or the Quora post that all have numbers that almost certainly goes to a scammer.
Bonus points when it makes it into the AI models (as happened here) where they repeat it verbatim as if it were the truth.
Like, common sense on the interwebs just continues to disappear. Gullibility seems to have increased as critical thinking and coming to logical conclusions are disappearing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_agency
[2] https://www.upcounsel.com/lectl-what-the-california-civil-co...
Whether they've been diligent enough in making that distinction (and whether that's even possible) will very likely be determined in court at some point.
Does it say that in the article or somewhere else? I didn’t see that in the article.
I bet they were wearing a real short skirt, too.
The collapse of search has happened faster than non-technical folks realize. They still trust the computer quite a bit.
You'd like to think so, right? However, this isn't really a solid thesis. Decent people will admit when they don't know. Is that normal? I've worked with so many people that just do not fit that definition at all, to the point it just seems like that's the normal way to behave. Maybe I'm jaded grossly overweighting it, but it just seems I have been in way too many meets with too many arguments over something because someone refused to back down and admit their ignorance/arrogance wasted valuable time because of refusal to accept input from others.
Let's get 1000 random people in a surgery room and ask them to perform brain surgery.
You actually think that most of them will say "sure I know exactly how to do this".
Be serious.
When was the last time Trump admitted he was wrong?
If a customer support agent gives you incorrect information, you can often hold the company liable for it (assuming you can prove it; I suppose there's a reason for why companies prefer certain support channels over others).
If an AI "lies" to you, you're largely on your own right now.
Notwithstanding differences in jurisdiction, applying that idea to this case would rely on finding that Meta owed Gaudreau a duty of care that extended to the Meta AI chatbot.
It would be more difficult to make this claim if Gaudreau had asked the question of Google, since Google itself is not usually responsible for false information uncovered by its searches.
My gut feeling is that it should be possible for companies to distinguish an AI product (i.e. as something provided to customers like a search engine, as you say) from an AI "working for them", but I can see a lot more disclaimers showing up in Meta's various AI chat channels soon.
A skilled motorcycle rider explaining how to take corners in a widely watched youtube video, with hundreds of comments confirming the advice and several recommended videos from other riders that basically say the same thing is an extremely strong positive signal.
The same answer gotten from a magic AI answer box is just as likely to be right as wrong, 50/50.
My point is just that credible sources are absolutely necessary for information to disperse. Nobody can afford to figure out the modern world from first principles.
The number of times I've been told that yes, resetting my iPhone's network settings and reinstalling an app will resolve my billing issue or similar...
"Messages are generated by Meta AI. Some may be inaccurate or inappropriate. Learn more."
Which leads to a pop-up further explaining that use cases include things like "creating something new like text or images".
I think it's going to be really interesting to see whether that's considered enough by courts, or if they'll take the position that these things pretend too well to be a real person to make such a disclaimer sufficient, similarly to how e.g. a brokerage can't disclaim "no investment advice" and then go on to say "but buy this stock, it's gonna moon tomorrow, trust me bro".