Don't make me talk to your chatbot

Molitor5901

Related: Please don't make me talk to your AI pretend-human complete with Asian accent and background call center sounds. That's even more insulting that a chat bot.

kokanee

I view the issue of inefficient communication as a problem that will wane as LLMs progress, and a bit idealistic about the efficiency of most human-to-human communication. I feel strongly that we shouldn't be forced to interact with chatbots for a much simpler reason: it's rude. It's dismissive of the time and attention of the person on the other end; it demonstrates laziness or an inability to succeed without cutting corners, and it is an affront to the value of human interaction (regardless of efficiency).

senko

I thought this was going to be about (customer support) chatbots, which can be a good thing. " Don't make me talk to your [customer support] chatbot " reads like " Don't make me go to an ATM for a cash withdrawal ". If I can solve a thing quickly and effectively without waiting forever to speak to an overworked customer support agent on another contitent, I would very much like that! Well, anyways, the post is not about that. It's about posting AI-generated text (blog posts, PR summaries). Which I agree with, although there are a bunch of holes in the argument, such as: > 1. Figure out what you want to say. 2. Say it. That first figuring-out part is important. Well, yeah, I can figure out what I want to say, then have the chatbot say it. So looks like the second part is important, too.

tombert

I guess part of the advantage of being an extremely long-winded writer who makes lots of typos is that people know that what I'm writing is probably written by a human. Though maybe people will start supplying context like "no em dashes, and occasionally misspell a word or two", and soon you won't even be able to tell that.

ivarv

For a similar take see Cory Doctorow's recent "No one wants to read your AI slop" - https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/02/nonconsensual-slopping/#r...

com2kid

People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. Did we have actual support issues that needed fixing, yes of course. And the insanely high cost of customer support drove us to improve our first use experience. But holy cow people don't realize how expensive support calls are. Edit: To explain some of the costs - This was back when people worked in physical call centers, so first off we were paying for physical office space. Next up training, each CSR had to be trained on our product. This took time and we had to pay for that training time. We also had to write support material, and update that support material for each new version that came out. All of this gets amortized into the cost of support. Because workers tend not to stay long, you pay for a lot of training. Add in all the other costs associated with running a call center and the cost per call, even for off shore call centers, is not cheap. In a reasonable world we'd just raise the price of the product by $x based on what % of people we expect to call in for support (ignore for a minute that estimating that number is hard ), but the world isn't reasonable. Downwards price pressure comes from all sides, primarily VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share, and competitors at other FAANGs that are OK burning money to gain market share. The result is that everyone is going to try and reduce support costs because holy cow per user margins are low now days for huge swaths of product categories (Apple's iPhone being a notable exception...)

ares623

Day by day i'm starting to lean towards this take https://anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/haterdom/2025/08/2...

pizzathyme

The key thing here is not whether it's AI. The key thing is quality and signal. No one wants to read to a low quality human comment either. If the AI output was actually better than talking to a real human, more useful, more concise, serving the job to be done, then no one would have a problem with it. In fact they would appreciate it. That future is not here in many areas. The problem is people are wielding AI right now and either [a] the models they are using are not good enough, [b] they aren't being given enough context, or [c] they are deployed in a way that makes it sloppy (Insert joke about whether this comment is AI. It's not, but joke away)

onion2k

There's been a lot of "the world doesn't work the way I want it to" on HN recently. I suspect this is a function of an aging readership more than anything particularly groundbreaking about hot takes on the up and coming tech. "Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." Douglas Adams

red75prime

I have a shorter, more cynical version of this: if a person doesn’t provide enough input to a chatbot, I’d be better off talking to the chatbot directly.

arewethereyeta

Amen! All our banks introduced this we cannot talk to a human unless it's fraud.

TimFogarty

I have noticed that my writing ability has atrophied since I was writing essays in school. Now at work most of my writing is slack messages. Writing longer more thoughtful pieces about strategy or performance review has become a slog. I suspect that a lot of people have had a similar experience so offloading the pain of writing to an LLM is appealing. But frankly LLMs suck at writing. It's not only formulaic, it's uninspired!! So I worry that we're entering an era of mediocre writing. I like the "Have you considered writing?" suggestion. I've been trying to make a habit of writing book reviews so I can counter some of the writing atrophy I've developed. Hopefully it will help me become a better thinker too. As Ray says here: "Understanding your own point of view is an enriching exercise."

SaberTail

The "figure out what you want to say" is key. I've started to think of LLMs, at least in a business setting, as misunderstanding amplifiers. How many times at work have you been talking to someone else where they're using common words as jargon? Maybe it's something like "the online system" or "the platform". And it's perfectly clear to them what they mean, but everyone else in the company either doesn't know what that actually is, or they have a distorted idea based on the conventional definitions of the words. Even without LLMs in the mix, this can lead to people coming out of meetings with completely different understandings of what's going on. My experience is few people are actually providing the relevant context to the LLM to explain what they mean in situations like this. Or they don't have the actual knowledge and are using the LLM in the hopes it'll fill in for their ignorance. The LLMs are RLHFed to sound confident, so they won't convey that they don't know what a piece of jargon means. Instead they'll use a combination of the common meaning and the rest of the context to invent something. When this gets copy/pasted and sent around, it causes everyone who isn't familiar to get the wrong idea. Hence "misunderstanding amplifier". To the point of the article, this is soluble if people take the time to actually figure out what they are trying to convey. But if they did that, they wouldn't need the LLM in the first place.

aprentic

People want to spend as little as possible while getting support for their product as long as possible. Companies want people to spend as much as possible while doing the minimum work on the product. Chatbots let companies spend almost nothing while pretending to provide long-term support. I wonder if something similar to a copyleft license could help. What if there was a contractual "fair business" pledge that companies could add? I imagine that good enough lawyers could craft something that essentially said, "You can only display this contract if you legally guarantee that you do X, Y, Z and do not do A, B C."

jmyeet

I'm reminded of the Air Canada customer service chatbot. It completely made up a refund policy (and there are still people on HN who insist LLMs don't hallucinate) and a court ruled the company had to honor it [1]. The only way to deal with this is to make the implentation not worth it by constantly bypassing it to speak to a human and/or making it cost money by getting it to give you things you're not otherwise entitled to. I really wonder how these things will handle prompt injection and similar things. I have no confidence any of this is secure. Wait until this comes to healthcare and it'll be chatbots handling appeals to prior authorization denials, wasting even more physician time. [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/air-canada-chatbot-refund-policy...

daft_pink

I just signed up with Gusto for one of my companies. They charged me for premium support automatically and when I tried to dispute it I had to talk in circles with their AI named Gus. Why am I paying through the nose for premium support just to chat with an AI?

ifokiedoke

Reading almost all the comments gives me the sad validation that people truly do not read the article before commenting... This article is not about support chatbots. It's about clearing up your writing/thoughts and communicating clearly even if you used a chatbot to get there.

this_user

I don't know, occasionally there are some funny results. For instance, I have managed to get AWS' support bot to start smack talking their platform and criticising its often needlessly complex and sometimes incoherent design before cheekily offering to help me make my relative simple setup even more complex and enterprise-ready.

hungryhobbit

I find chatbot conversations to be incredibly similar to dreams. It's human nature to want to share your dreams, because they are fascinating to you . However, it's also human nature to want to punch someone in the face when they start talking about this crazy dream they had last night ... because it has nothing to do with you, and doesn't interest you at all. Similarly, when an AI says something useful to you , in response to your prompts , it's very particular to you. When you try to share it with others ... you get the article.

hidelooktropic

It matters less to me that the helper is an AI/human than the kind of help I'm getting. The bigger problem to me is "help" is always framed as my needing to be educated, not a problem with the service. This is especially prevalent for technical customers who are legitimately trying to draw attention to a bug in the platform only to get how-to help articles pasted back to them.