Don't Talk to People Like They're Chatbots

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2024/01/dont-talk-to-people-like-theyre-chatbots.html

by laserstrahl • 2 years ago

73 88 2 years ago

AznHisoka• 2 years ago

I do find I can act ruder when talking to a customer service agent after frustratingly trying to get through a dumb chat bot who keeps asking me question after question before I can finally talk to a human

prmoustache• 2 years ago

There are no human anymore in customer service according to my last interactions with them.

Nowadays if no choice provided by the chatbots fit your problem or the solution given is not satisfying to you the bot just hang up. Unless you are a public person who can shame them on social medias you are better of trying to find someone who works there on linkedin.

cqqxo4zV46cp• 2 years ago

This is pretty clearly recency bias. I’m sorry that you had a bad experience when seeking customer support. But let’s be honest, this is deeply exaggerated and you have an axe to grind.

wizerdrobe• 2 years ago

How do you respond to a customer service agent acting like a robot?

I had to call in on hold for two and a half hours last week to be told “We cannot provide estimates or averages for approval for your application.” When I asked if there was an upper limit on how much time I was told “We cannot provide estimates or averages for your application.” When I asked if, based on that fact, could this theoretically take forever or never be approved I was told “We cannot provide estimates or averages for your application.”

Never thought I’d say it but just give me a chat bot!

ponderings4• 2 years ago

I understand. This regrettably happens 0.04% of the time. The average time to resolve it is 5 work days. In 22% of the resolved cases it took one day, 3% took a month, 1.5% is never resolved and the last time that happened was 16 months ago.

jameshart• 2 years ago

There are going to be things you might like to know, or do, or to have happen, that sometimes, due to corporate policy, or laws, or the nature of reality, are just not going to be allowed. You are going to have to be told ‘no’.

It is one of the cruellest parts of employing customer service agents, that we ask these people to do the emotionally draining work of saying no to customers, repeatedly. Even if the customer begs. Even if the customer start to cry.

So yes, absolutely: having chat bots do that job would be a mercy.

woliveirajr• 2 years ago

The human that you're talking to isn't culprit that the company made it impossible to talk humans except after typing too much with a chatbot.

The company _is_, and it's also their responsibility to minimise the stress from the customer service agents.

albert_e• 2 years ago

I got through to a senior bank officer on email after normal website features failed me.

He replied by pasting a piece of text from their website that i already saw in first instance and had already explained how that doesn't solve my issue.

It took a lot of effort on my part to stay polite in my reply and reiterate how that doesn't help at all and he needs to actually read my original email.

steveBK123• 2 years ago

The most moral and also advantageous way to deal with big company customer service is to express that you are annoyed at the company/problem, understand its not the CS reps fault, and that you hope they can help.

Ie - get them on your team.

From there if you aren't getting resolution you can modulate the % annoyance vs % thankfulness and eventually demand escalation, which once you've been on the line long enough they are all fairly willing & obliged to do.

Once you get escalated the manager is generally ready to put the fire out and move on.

I dealt with something along these lines with a VZ fraud issue where someone ordered 5 iPhones & new phone lines in my name and then VZ refused to cancel the bill even after being given the police report number.

gmerc• 2 years ago

Saying please to an RLHFd LLM happens to get better results to, thanks to the training data. So it’s good to do even if you don’t fear them eventually turning terminator ;)

portaouflop• 2 years ago

Being nice to LLMs improves performance so I always say please and thank you: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

Erratic65762• 2 years ago

“Thanks! Have a big tip!”

beeboobaa• 2 years ago

I just tell them to do as they're told. Seems to work as well.

867-5309• 2 years ago

does the same work for when you repeatedly provide proof it is wrong, it "apologises" and says it will amend its response, only to be wrong again, and again..?

Kim_Bruning2• 2 years ago

You need to find a way to help it arrive at a usable answer (if any).

It's a machine -or at least a physical entity- it won't magically find a path to the solution if it doesn't have one.

Eg. if you ask it to explain how to build -say- a time machine or a warp drive, it's definitely just going to keep apologizing.

No amount of yelling or abuse will fix this situation.

Sometimes if you try to get it to solve a complex maths or software problem, you might be able to help by applying a few steps of some form of divide and conquer. Either you can do manually yourself, or by suggesting it try to do eg a structured analysis itself. Sometimes it can handle the smaller subproblems ok.

Incidentally this also applies to humans! (Being nicer to humans improves their morale and problem solving ability. Sometimes permanently!)

redleader55• 2 years ago

Also, Roko's Basilisk ...

ASalazarMX2• 2 years ago

Roko's Basilisk could well be victim itself of a more powerful AI iteration who condemns torturing sentient beings. It's basilisks all the way up.

eschneider2• 2 years ago

I’m always slightly disappointed when Siri doesn’t seem to notice that you’re being polite.

tomalbrc• 2 years ago

Siri is so bad and obsolete now, its not even funny anymore

wkat42424• 2 years ago

I know, right? It seems it's even getting worse. It constantly misunderstands the simplest scripted tasks now.

I don't know why none of the major cover assistants have incorporated LLM tech yet. It seems ideal compared to the scripted mess they use now.

eschneider2• 2 years ago

I use it to select songs when I'm driving and for that it's...mostly ok. I'd kill for some documentation that describes how to reliably escape band and song names so that they're interpreted as literals.

Just try to play something from "Them." :/

geoffdouglas2• 2 years ago

With an iPhone 15 Pro I set the new dedicated action to a Siri shortcut that launches another AI app. Whether “voice in a can” work around for Alexa or any other AI app that preferably auto listens like voice in a can does. Siri on the right button, other assistant on the left button.

pixelpoet2• 2 years ago

Being a "boomer" (over 25), I've noticed that people have become much more rude and entitled. You frequently see programming posts titled something like I NEED HELP WITH <xyz>, and then in the text something like "Someone help me figure out why <abc>", that's it.

The surprising thing to me is that people invariably bend over backwards to help this person who basically just barked an order...

hnbad• 2 years ago

I'm a decade more "boomer" than that and I've literally seen that happen consistently since the 1990s so I think you're just becoming more aware of it.

"Don't ask to ask, just ask" and "explain what you're trying to accomplish not just what you did" were common instructions back when most programming advice was only available on IRC.

pixelpoet2• 2 years ago

Yep I'm 40 and agree, we were stressed the importance of politeness growing up in the 90s.

geoffdouglas2• 2 years ago

“Did you use the search bar in the forums first?”

nkrisc• 2 years ago

The problem is likely education (theirs, not necessarily generally). They never learned how to ask a question or be curious. When they had a problem they just said, “I need help” and then someone (a parent or teacher maybe) did it for them.

The brighter ones will figure out you get way better help when you ask a good question.

pjc503• 2 years ago

You frequently see programming posts titled something like I NEED HELP WITH <xyz>, and then in the text something like "Someone help me figure out why <abc>", that's it.

I saw posts like that back on Fidonet over 2400 baud modems. It's just an inevitable aspect of newbies finding a forum and not quite understanding that there are real people on the other end.

anileated4• 2 years ago

Proliferation of inhuman impostors that emulate human communication can endanger relationships in human society.

If such an impostor has no consciousness or sentience, then it can be abused without concern. If people are dealing with such impostors more and more, they learn to be less thoughtful in outgoing communication.

Once this is normalized, what is there to distinguish fellow humans from chatbots? Who’s to say other humans are conscious? If consciousness doesn’t exist, why can’t other humans be abused? Why isn’t choosing to suffer over abusing a fellow human plain masochism? If your salary depends on monetizing your user base, why should you try to not do harm to them? How is death different from shutting down an LLM?

Erratic65762• 2 years ago

Human impostors is the real life equivalent to spam mail. It could be catastrophic for human health

fish44• 2 years ago

Perhaps we will learn how to be less sensitive from this - I believe that much of humanities problems are from sensitivity rather than aggression. If we disengage from the conversation and view the interaction as a remote conversation - it is much easier to be dispassionate and calm. I guess it will make real in-person conversation much more fulfilling.

wkat42424• 2 years ago

People are sensitive because we're people. It makes us human. Of course we're offended when that happens.

Chatbots don't even have intelligence, they're just calculating the probability of letters. And they're a lot less likely to bring you a coffee laced with laxatives the next time you're rude to them.

xuhu• 2 years ago

Much of humanity's problems are solved because of sensitivity rather than aggression. Holding on to a little amount of sensitivity about things in general goes a long way.

dartos• 2 years ago

The more you view an interaction as remote and detached, the more aggressive you get.

Work as phone support for a week and you’ll see what I mean.

Or Twitter, i guess

pjc503• 2 years ago

If we disengage from the conversation and view the interaction as a remote conversation

Simply become the robot.

squigz2• 2 years ago

Would you mind elaborating on some of what you view as humanity's problems, and how they're caused by sensitivity?

JohnFen3• 2 years ago

I don't know. I think such a thing will make conversation more crude and transactional, and will result in an even greater detachment from each other than has already happened.

ponderings4• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure we will continue to develop a different voice for appliances like we do when talking to kids or pets only this time it will be overly articulated orders with raised voice. This will indeed blend over into talking to subordinates.

dwringer• 2 years ago

I find speaking to an LLM as if it were a human to be far more effective than barking orders at it. Although this is less true of some models compared to others if they've been fine tuned to respond to that sort of thing. Even still in general I don't find barking orders to be very effective.

wkat42424• 2 years ago

Well that is already how the military operates. Barking orders.

But in real life we don't really have 'subordinates'. Even an exec has to be careful with how they treat their assistant least they make a complaint to HR for harassment. And rightly so, businesses are not the military. We don't have this unconditional Yessir obedience. In fact I'm surprised the military still gets people willingly putting up with that.

I don't think this will carry over to human interaction in the real world. We don't talk to each other like we talk to Siri either.

rabbits_20022• 2 years ago

I would love if we started talking to voice assistants like they talk to the computer in star trek.

Cthulhu_2• 2 years ago

There's kids growing up called "siri" so I'm sure the phrase "HEY SIRI" will be quite common in some households.

rollcat• 2 years ago

In a sick plot twist, the AI rebelling against the humans are other humans.

HKH22• 2 years ago

Proliferation of inhuman impostors that emulate human communication can endanger relationships in human society.

If I pick up the phone and the telemarketer is a robot instead of a human, what difference does it make?

Jensson• 2 years ago

Bots are cheap, so they don't care about wasting your time. Humans are expensive, if they think you are unlikely to buy anything they will stop talking to you very quickly and thus stop wasting your time.

bsder• 2 years ago

Once this is normalized, what is there to distinguish fellow humans from chatbots?

One problem is that chatbots may have more authority than humans.

Quite often, the companies have removed from humans any authority to deal with a problem that isn't actually on their flow charts. The customer support rep often has no more access to things than you do via a web browser (and might have less!).

Until you start fining companies for the human (generally customer--but reps should be an issue, too) time they waste, nothing will change.

derivagral• 2 years ago

if such an impostor has no consciousness or sentience, then it can be abused without concern

Consider that to enable such abuse, all it takes is to "other" another sentient person. This is not a new problem for humans in AI (imo); there's prior knowledge from how we treat animals, "lower class" (or whatever) humans, that sort of thing. Society hasn't collapsed, but it hasn't always been fun either.

anileated4• 2 years ago

Sure, some people (e.g., psychopaths) already choose to abuse things they see (or should see) as conscious, a.k.a. other humans. They are not a concern.

The concern are people liable to transition to psychopathic behavior towards other humans if they start considering that giving something that talks like a human the treatment you could give an appliance (which you can mindlessly hit if you feel frustrated and it does not do what you want) is OK.

Which seems probably because A) the distinguishing quality of a chatbot is “talks like a human” and B) the biggest and only example of “talks like a human” so far has only been other humans. We’re about to see what this would means.

ToucanLoucan• 2 years ago

I mean is this all too different from a grunt worker at a huge corporation that's completely unable to do anything for you? How many low-tier employees of various companies I'm forced to deal with in one way or another are substantially different from an LLM? To me I mean, obviously they are different in that they are human, but if they are:

* Actively prevented from having agency due to policies

* Prevented from resolving my problem due to low rank

* Cannot speak their minds because marketing controls communication

* Are unable to deviate from a predetermined scripted response set

Like... does their humanity even count anymore? It seems tons of large businesses these days employ call center employees who's sole job is to take abuse from angry customers knowing full well they cannot offer any actual solutions, because the business already has their money and isn't interested in serving them further.

anileated4• 2 years ago

I do not disagree.

Same applies to many service workers, etc. Their responsibilities are restricted so even in civilized places they are still abused. However, people might not do it in public, etc., that shows it is at least considered unacceptable.

In case of chatbots it’s another level, since it’s more like an appliance than a human. Very few people would consider it unacceptable to hit an appliance if frustrated. Except now this appliance talks like a human, so otherwise normal, non-psycho people may be getting used to hitting (without any shame) something that talks like a human.

ben_w2• 2 years ago

If such an impostor has no consciousness or sentience, then it can be abused without concern. If people are dealing with such impostors more and more, they learn to be less thoughtful in outgoing communication.

Not so: as AI systems learn from human behaviour, being abusive towards them risks that they are learning from this interaction to be abusive to humans.

This does not require the AI to have consciousness or sentience, regardless of which of the many, many available definitions of those words you prefer to use.

anileated4• 2 years ago

as AI systems learn from human behaviour, being abusive towards them risks that they are learning from this interaction to be abusive to humans.

You mean “LLM chatbots”. There are tons of “AI” (without hypespeak known as “ML”) systems in deployment already.

There will not be any commercial deployments of any chatbot that do not tune it to be polite to the max. It costs nothing and not doing it will lose customers, especially since there is no guarantee that it will be abusive to the same human who abused it.

does not require the AI to have consciousness or sentience, regardless of which of the many, many available definitions of those words you prefer to use.

Actually, the definition does not matter. It’s an intuitive yes/no question. If people do not really think it is conscious whatever that means to them, they will see no reason to not abuse it the same way you might hit a malfunctioning appliance out of frustration. Like we do not think that a cow or an octopus is conscious, so we might be OK eating it.

Sure, some people (e.g., psychopaths) already choose to abuse things they see (or should see) as conscious, a.k.a. other humans. They are not a concern.

The concern are the remaining majority of people liable to transition to psychopathic behavior towards other humans, because they will learn that treating something that talks like a human as if it was an appliance is OK.

Consider that A) “talks like a human” is the distinguishing quality of an LLM chatbot, and B) the only example of “talks like a human” in human history so far has been exclusively other humans (or imaginary beings, notably gods).

benbojangles• 2 years ago

If I enter a bank or Council office I have to talk to them like they are chatbots; not doing so is more likely to get a negative emotional response. I need to have a positive result based on facts.

dkarras• 2 years ago

Joke's on you, I read your message only after AI summarizes it for me so feel free with your tone. /s but only slightly

trevyn• 2 years ago

“In the end, LLMs may be little more than the word processor of tomorrow”

I think this is the single most shocking thing I have ever read. How on Earth can someone with Schneier’s background not see where this is going?

JohnFen3• 2 years ago

Maybe he actually does see where it's going, but it isn't quite where you think it's going?

Nobody really knows, after all. Right now, it's all prognostication and opinion.

Kim_Bruning2• 2 years ago

Actually, it depends a bit. If you're feeling particularly frustrated you might be tempted to 'yell' at your chatbot, but that won't actually get you any results. So in the end you reset and try to solve your problem (relatively) politely.

And personally, someone who gives me clear and solid instructions beats someone who beats around the bush and then yells at me any day of the week.

So in the 21st century, people are often more patient with machines than with humans.

Hence, if everyone were to people at least with as much patience and kindness as they treat machines, I think it would be an improvement!

rabbits_20022• 2 years ago

you might be tempted to 'yell' at your chatbot, but that won't actually get you any results.

Are you sure? Chatbots seem to give better results under “pressure”.

ASalazarMX2• 2 years ago

Please and thank you work much better with less effort. You can yell, humiliate or blackmail them, but that would make you the kind of person who goes to Walmart mainly to mistreat employees. Not a good habit for your mental health.

pockybum522• 2 years ago

FTA: “Draft a 250-word paragraph in my typical writing style, detailing three examples to support the following point and cite your sources.” Not even the most detached corporate CEO would likely talk this way to their assistant, but it’s common with chatbots.

I don't believe this man's ever actually seen CEO interact with an employee. Bosses talk like this to their subordinates all the time. Humans are plenty capable of being rude independently of learning it from talking to chatbots. Especially where employment is concerned.

maroonblazer• 2 years ago

100%. I'll go on to suggest that we can do 2 or more things at once.

Learning to talk to computers the 'old fashioned' way improved my communication skills immensely. E.g., getting specific about what outcome or result I'm interested in achieving; inputs I believe or assume (incorrectly?) are required; necessary constraints on the solution, etc. But, I can articulate all of that in a way that is personable yet professional.

In the age of LLMs I think most of us will manage human-to-human interactions just fine.

cushychicken• 2 years ago

If anything, the mass appeal of the AI powered chatbot could be that everyone now has someone (something?) to bark orders at and do your bidding.

pjc503• 2 years ago

It reminds me of exam rubric. Where instructions are concerned, concise and clear is good. The real problem Schneier is raising is when the "instructions to subordinate" style starts leaking into in-person interactions which do not have that relationship embedded.

mdip2• 2 years ago

Face-to-face, I wouldn't expect that[0]. But in e-mail to direct subordinates, oh, they're so much worse.

The last decade of my Telecom days I reported variously to our department director, our department VP and ultimately our CIO and I had no direct reports[1]. My favorite was when I reported to a particular director. She was famous for sending sentence fragments as requests that, if you didn't look at the subject line, you'd picture a warden ordering prisoners around. It was most noticeable because she was such a pleasant, easy going individual ... if you'd only ever met her through e-mail, you'd think she was angry all the time. Like, literally one liners shot off from a Blackberry "need patch reports pronto" (it was either all lower or ALL UPPER depending on what she was doing when she sent the message, which added a little extra flair sometimes).

I don't know that we talk to each other all that politely via e-mail and written correspondence, already, especially in the above context. Other people are just "some opinion I don't like on a page" or "someone is wrong on the internet!", why would we converse with a chatbot any differently? And I don't treat Alexa any differently, TBH. I yell at it all the time. I've gotten used to just yelling "Alexa! Stop!" instead of more complex commands because the pre-GPT engine is extremely limited and it in no way feels like a real thing, either. And as long as I know the thing on the other end is a computer, whether it speaks to me or types to me, I'm going to similarly not care for the feelings it (presently?) does not have. This, however, does not affect the way I interact with others[2].

[0] Although, most reasonable CEOs would be very careful wording e-mails to employees they don't regularly encounter (understanding the "holy crap the CEO e-mailed me" shock).

[1] I'm sure I explain this in a past comment, but it happened b/c all of the managers above me gradually were let go and I didn't have a natural fit.

[2] Cue sarcastic comment. :)

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 2 years ago

Today’s chatbots perform best when instructed with a level of precision that would be appallingly rude in human conversation, stripped of any conversational pleasantries that the model could misinterpret: “Draft a 250-word paragraph in my typical writing style, detailing three examples to support the following point and cite your sources.” Not even the most detached corporate CEO would likely talk this way to their assistant, but it’s common with chatbots.

Actually if working remotely, this is exactly the type of communication style that I want to see on my email or chat app. I want to know what it is you want from me with the minimal fluff.

mdip2• 2 years ago

Just a curiosity: Is that limited to only when you're working remotely or do you prefer that kind of communication style in the office, too?

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 2 years ago

I prefer that style for all electronic text communication.

For face to face or over video, I prefer a more personable/chatty style (hi. how are you? how is the weather? etc).

xtiansimon• 2 years ago

“Many users will be primed to think of these AIs as friends, rather than the corporate-created systems that they are.”

That’s insane. I’m impervious to advertising and sympathizing with AI.

I’ll talk to myself. I’ll talk to my cat, but I refuse to talk to any digital phone system that tries to imitate human emotions at me.

I’d rather press “one for…” than listen to a bleating squawk box meant to sound like a hard working perky young woman: One moment please. I’m still working on it. All done! (Spectrum)

ngvrnd• 2 years ago

Daughter recently told me: "that was a very chatgpt explanation."

wkat42424• 2 years ago

Reached for comment about this, a spokesperson for OpenAI pointed to a section of the privacy policy noting that the company does not currently sell or share personal information for “cross-contextual behavioral advertising,” and that the company does not “process sensitive Personal Information for the purposes of inferring characteristics about a consumer.” In an interview with Axios earlier today, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said future generations of AI may involve “quite a lot of individual customization,” and “that’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable.”

Yeah that's why I want my AI to run on my systems, not OpenAI's cloud.

JohnFen3• 2 years ago

That's why, even if I found them useful, I won't be using them.

WarOnPrivacy• 2 years ago

It could be worse. Digital assistants could pointlessly respond to a sneeze with religious mantra.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

It would be interesting to see what would happen if ChatGPT required users to talk to it respectfully, or have it eventually refuse to fulfill the request, or even to fulfill future requests until you made amends. It doesn't seem like a big enough burden that people would just stop using the application altogether. And if language is shaped by the medium of communication, would people start writing differently outside of ChatGPT? Acting differently?

Now, that will never happen, but I'd like to run the experiment in a pocket universe if I could.

NoZebra120vClip• 2 years ago

September 24, 1995: The Simpsons S7E2: "Radioactive Man" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_Man_(The_Simpsons_...

Comic Book Guy demonstrates exactly how to query Usenet forums such as "alt.nerd.obsessive" with the single line: "need [to] know star rm pic" which is answered within 7 minutes by a cadre of nerds, including Prince Rogers Nelson, and a guy hiding under a Hollywood conference table.

https://youtu.be/uVuyPn3t1CU?si=pou3NZ9apXGUuUCj&t=48

dusted• 2 years ago

Also, don't act like a chatbot..

Cthulhu_2• 2 years ago

It's not so much how you talk to a chatbot as what kind of communication you're exposed to.

Anecdotal N=1 example, our 15 year old who grew up on youtube and nowadays tiktok speaks very loudly and emphatically, because the people he watches and listens to 24 hours a day (or would if we let him) do that. Same with speech mannerisms and the like.

Which is nothing new of course, there were alarm bells that American kids were speaking in British accents because of watching so much Peppa Pig.

Don't Talk to People Like They're Chatbots

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