> There is nothing more frustrating than pointing out a legitimate bug only to feel like you're talking to a brick wall.
At a bare minimum, this sentence was AI inspired. Likely generated. Which certainly casts the whole response into doubt (that it is human-written.) Reads more to me like a person gave a quick quippy response to an AI to clean up, then just took the output and replied.
I only saw pangram being mentioned on HN. How good is it in general ? And what do they use to check if a text is AI Generated, the text watermarks from big models ?
I read it twice and the second time it stood out as not.
Usually there is a taste about AI generated messages that are just quite obvious, it's usually pretty close to corporate speak, but not exactly the same.
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.
I think ideally a product should not need customer service in the first place.
I had wildly different results. A lot of customer service sucked, other customer
service was ok-ish. But in general it always takes away my time. Often a really
well-designed manual, FAQ etc... solves most issues. Only in a few instances I had
to rely on customer services.
I think ideally a product should not need customer service in the first place.
That's what I tell my boss when she asks what can be done to increase the number of visitors to our web site.
I keep telling her, this isn't Burger Hut, it's healthcare. If people are visiting the web site, it's because things are going poorly, not because things are going well. If the doctors do their jobs, I don't have to do mine.
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.
You cannot pull that off if you're mid, and mid is exactly what the statistical average of humanity is.
It will try though, and it will just be an asshole.
Which, funnily enough, is exactly the same failure mode as mid humans trying on that costume fall into.
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 :)
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.
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.
> You can just prompt your AI agent to "avoid sounding like AI."
It'll never work like that, because everybody else giving that same direction will get more or less the same result, which will itself come to be recognized as sounding like "AI`" for any popular model+harness.
What you'll always need to do is instill your AI with some idiosyncratic voice that distinguishes it from others, which you can achieve in a variety of ways (stylistic direction, audience characterization, style mimickry, personalized finetuning, etc). Presumably, tools for doing this will eventually make it into the harness products but anybody who doesn't use them is always just going to end up generating recognizably AI slop prose. It's the nature of the technology.
A secondary consequence (even if you just use "avoid sounding like AI") is that because the technology works its magic mostly through prose-streams in its own voice, these idiosyncratic voice changes will also nudge its behavior away from benchmark norms. You won't necessarily lose capability on any given task (you may even gain on some), but external reference points/measures about its capabilities will become less applicable.
>AI will ultimately prove better at generating the kind of message the author prefers
It's already pretty straightforward to improve this default "You're absolutely right about [your email reworded]" response but you still see it everywhere. The corpos simply don't care to fix it because doing so probably doesn't affect w/e metric they're modelling.
I think the real question to ask is not really about the tools themselves but where the organisation's incentives really lie. I've come to the conclusion that customer satisfaction just isn't up there anymore. You'll eat whatever garbage is served in your trough (from their POV)
> You can just prompt your AI agent to "avoid sounding like AI."
I’ve tried this with claude. I told it to output HTML that didn’t look like it came from claude and to avoid common claudisms. It didn’t work and still used claude boxes all over the place. I’m sure with enough time I could get it there, but at that point I may as well write the HTML myself.
Personally, I can't stand default LLM writing. I found out about this skill https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd That I actually copy-pasted into the default instructions for Claude.
It's night and day, I wouldn't have been able to use it if it wrote in its default style.
It can be a bit weird because when it outputs a list it asks you to report on the first item (and usually it's stuff so small I do all the steps before writing to it again).
I still wonder if AI will be designed to have flavor profiles like coffee. Right now I don't think alot of product thinking has gone into this line (maybe it has??) but I suspect that AIX (AI eXperience) design will become more and more of a thing as the space matures.
I'm sure to some degree people (and AI being used to build AI) are kind of doing this thing but I don't yet think that OpenAI has a distinct flavor profile for their models that they have standardized on and are intending to lock into over time.
When I go to Starbucks I know what I'm going to get and it's been reasonably consistent over a decade plus and similarly that's true of other coffee shops which have different profiles. I'm expecting something along those lines.
A fast, shallow reply doesn't save a customer's time. It's just a useless volley back to the customer that keeps their request off the support queue.
It may burn off customer support engagement among customers who don't have the capacity or patience to keep pushing for help (this is a bad outcome for customers, but looks deceptively positive in vendor-side metrics), but for the remaining customers it just adds latency and work.
Before the AI first level support often wasn't allowed to type answers but instead copy paste one of the answers from the faq, which was extremely frustrating.
The chat would go like this:
- I have a question about "no vehicles in the park" policy. Does it include motorized wheelchairs?
- To guarantee safety and blablabla our policy is that no vehicles are allowed in the park.
- so can i go to the park with a wheelchair with a battery and electric engine?
- To guarantee safety and blablabla our policy is that no vehicles are allowed in the park. Please see our safety policy (link).
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.
The reason you like it is the same reason people in customer service like it, too, they can do their job with less effort and coast on middling skill for longer.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I find the AI monomania on here a bit tiresome too, but you can hardly grumble that a board dedicated to tech startups and hacker culture talks a lot about AI.
It's the equivalent of people a hundred years ago complaining electrical publications featured radio excessively, yes it'd be annoying but hardly off-topic or outside of their typical wheelhouse.
It is the top tech issue currently, and perhaps of most of our lives. We're in the first stages of a new industrial revolution, talking about it while it happens is par for the course.
Give em a break, ees a supersimpleguy. Had to break out the keyboard and register a new account, just to say ee's judging us, without realizing that makes him one of us and that he's passing judgement upon himself. We all know who's going to be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
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.
Auto reply emails aren't a new thing. Most come with a disclosure at the end that it's automated and they have a neutral tone "We acknowledge your reported problem, it's been forwarded to our engineers" (so people don't bother replying back).
I personally would rather get a literal auto reply ack e-mail generated by some python script than an LLM response that just rephrases the context. The python script will be more compute efficient too for this usecase.
"yummy good feelings" seems unnecessarily dismissive. I think lots of people have an intuition that when their human communications are handled in an inhuman way (whether that's a phone recording, automated messages whether authored by a human or ai, etc), there is a lack of reciprocity involved that feels disrespectful.
The second response reads as very much written by AI to me too.
> There is nothing more frustrating than pointing out a legitimate bug only to feel like you're talking to a brick wall.
At a bare minimum, this sentence was AI inspired. Likely generated. Which certainly casts the whole response into doubt (that it is human-written.) Reads more to me like a person gave a quick quippy response to an AI to clean up, then just took the output and replied.
And also to pangram 4.1, which rates it as 100% AI Generated.
I only saw pangram being mentioned on HN. How good is it in general ? And what do they use to check if a text is AI Generated, the text watermarks from big models ?
I hadn't heard of it before, just now looking them up.
Dumb question, but could you pair AI with pangram to make it sound less like AI or would that be a recursive loop? I'm skeptical about it
That's what adversarial model training is basically.
That is what I immediatelly detected too, but was in shock that the author fell for it.
I read it twice and the second time it stood out as not.
Usually there is a taste about AI generated messages that are just quite obvious, it's usually pretty close to corporate speak, but not exactly the same.
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.
>I never contact customer service with a complaint, I just don't use them again.
my phone provider double-charged my credit card so i had to call in and get it reversed.
would you just accept the double charge, cancel your contract (and pay the cancellation fee), and then move to one of the other handful of providers?
Don't you run out of companies to use?
I think ideally a product should not need customer service in the first place.
I had wildly different results. A lot of customer service sucked, other customer service was ok-ish. But in general it always takes away my time. Often a really well-designed manual, FAQ etc... solves most issues. Only in a few instances I had to rely on customer services.
That seems unrealistic? If my order gets destroyed in shipping, or I need to order a replacement gizmo, I'll need to reach out to the company.
I think ideally a product should not need customer service in the first place.
That's what I tell my boss when she asks what can be done to increase the number of visitors to our web site.
I keep telling her, this isn't Burger Hut, it's healthcare. If people are visiting the web site, it's because things are going poorly, not because things are going well. If the doctors do their jobs, I don't have to do mine.
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.
It tries, but fails, as it lacks edge.
You cannot pull that off if you're mid, and mid is exactly what the statistical average of humanity is.
It will try though, and it will just be an asshole. Which, funnily enough, is exactly the same failure mode as mid humans trying on that costume fall into.
I'm fairly certain that second response is AI as well, unfortunately
100%
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 :)
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.
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.
> You can just prompt your AI agent to "avoid sounding like AI."
It'll never work like that, because everybody else giving that same direction will get more or less the same result, which will itself come to be recognized as sounding like "AI`" for any popular model+harness.
What you'll always need to do is instill your AI with some idiosyncratic voice that distinguishes it from others, which you can achieve in a variety of ways (stylistic direction, audience characterization, style mimickry, personalized finetuning, etc). Presumably, tools for doing this will eventually make it into the harness products but anybody who doesn't use them is always just going to end up generating recognizably AI slop prose. It's the nature of the technology.
A secondary consequence (even if you just use "avoid sounding like AI") is that because the technology works its magic mostly through prose-streams in its own voice, these idiosyncratic voice changes will also nudge its behavior away from benchmark norms. You won't necessarily lose capability on any given task (you may even gain on some), but external reference points/measures about its capabilities will become less applicable.
>AI will ultimately prove better at generating the kind of message the author prefers
It's already pretty straightforward to improve this default "You're absolutely right about [your email reworded]" response but you still see it everywhere. The corpos simply don't care to fix it because doing so probably doesn't affect w/e metric they're modelling.
I think the real question to ask is not really about the tools themselves but where the organisation's incentives really lie. I've come to the conclusion that customer satisfaction just isn't up there anymore. You'll eat whatever garbage is served in your trough (from their POV)
> You can just prompt your AI agent to "avoid sounding like AI."
I’ve tried this with claude. I told it to output HTML that didn’t look like it came from claude and to avoid common claudisms. It didn’t work and still used claude boxes all over the place. I’m sure with enough time I could get it there, but at that point I may as well write the HTML myself.
Personally, I can't stand default LLM writing. I found out about this skill https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd That I actually copy-pasted into the default instructions for Claude.
It's night and day, I wouldn't have been able to use it if it wrote in its default style.
It can be a bit weird because when it outputs a list it asks you to report on the first item (and usually it's stuff so small I do all the steps before writing to it again).
But it's so much clearer !
I still wonder if AI will be designed to have flavor profiles like coffee. Right now I don't think alot of product thinking has gone into this line (maybe it has??) but I suspect that AIX (AI eXperience) design will become more and more of a thing as the space matures.
I'm sure to some degree people (and AI being used to build AI) are kind of doing this thing but I don't yet think that OpenAI has a distinct flavor profile for their models that they have standardized on and are intending to lock into over time.
When I go to Starbucks I know what I'm going to get and it's been reasonably consistent over a decade plus and similarly that's true of other coffee shops which have different profiles. I'm expecting something along those lines.
> You can just prompt your AI agent to "avoid sounding like AI."
No, you cannot. You might get a slightly different writing style, but it will still be the same brand of slop.
If it was that easy, don't you think the AI labs themselves would just add that to their system prompt?
Right, like when generating code you can just say "make no mistakes" and it will make no mistakes.
/s
> 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.
A fast, shallow reply doesn't save a customer's time. It's just a useless volley back to the customer that keeps their request off the support queue.
It may burn off customer support engagement among customers who don't have the capacity or patience to keep pushing for help (this is a bad outcome for customers, but looks deceptively positive in vendor-side metrics), but for the remaining customers it just adds latency and work.
> A fast, shallow reply doesn't save a customer's time.
But that is true whether it is a human or an AI replying.
Proper AI can do a good job, just as proper customer support reps can.
The issue is in the overall value the company places on supporting their customers, not necessarily the means by which they do so.
Before the AI first level support often wasn't allowed to type answers but instead copy paste one of the answers from the faq, which was extremely frustrating.
The chat would go like this:
- I have a question about "no vehicles in the park" policy. Does it include motorized wheelchairs?
- To guarantee safety and blablabla our policy is that no vehicles are allowed in the park.
- so can i go to the park with a wheelchair with a battery and electric engine?
- To guarantee safety and blablabla our policy is that no vehicles are allowed in the park. Please see our safety policy (link).
Did… did a customer service clanker write this?
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.
The response is also probably AI.
In the past we would just get a canned response. Is that actually better than an AI response I wonder?
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.
The reason you like it is the same reason people in customer service like it, too, they can do their job with less effort and coast on middling skill for longer.
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.
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 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.
The problem is your Raspberry Pi powered agent is going to be no match for Amazon's gigacluster of GPUs.
Your puny local AI assistant will easily be outwitted by malicious agents with a million times the power.
I wrote a bit more about it at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/08/asymmetric-agents/
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.
Everything you touch online is AI now in some form or fashion but keep yelling at clouds and resisting to yourself.
Everything? Ok, Shut up stupid AI bot.
> 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
To me it's definitely more respectful not to pretend there's a person spending their time on the other end.
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 do realize that this kind of rant leads to AI designed to better emulate humans?
Obligatory https://xkcd.com/810
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.
I find the AI monomania on here a bit tiresome too, but you can hardly grumble that a board dedicated to tech startups and hacker culture talks a lot about AI.
It's the equivalent of people a hundred years ago complaining electrical publications featured radio excessively, yes it'd be annoying but hardly off-topic or outside of their typical wheelhouse.
It is the top tech issue currently, and perhaps of most of our lives. We're in the first stages of a new industrial revolution, talking about it while it happens is par for the course.
"You people", yet you find yourself here among us? You're free to leave, you know.
Give em a break, ees a supersimpleguy. Had to break out the keyboard and register a new account, just to say ee's judging us, without realizing that makes him one of us and that he's passing judgement upon himself. We all know who's going to be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Maybe they're not a person, either by construction or by choice.
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.
Auto reply emails aren't a new thing. Most come with a disclosure at the end that it's automated and they have a neutral tone "We acknowledge your reported problem, it's been forwarded to our engineers" (so people don't bother replying back).
I personally would rather get a literal auto reply ack e-mail generated by some python script than an LLM response that just rephrases the context. The python script will be more compute efficient too for this usecase.
"yummy good feelings" seems unnecessarily dismissive. I think lots of people have an intuition that when their human communications are handled in an inhuman way (whether that's a phone recording, automated messages whether authored by a human or ai, etc), there is a lack of reciprocity involved that feels disrespectful.