I couldn't disagree more. It's clear AI is going to have huge impacts on the world. It's just getting started though.
Imagine every time you call support, instead of having some annoying rules-based automated system, you're having a natural conversation with an AI that is fluent in your language. That's possible with today's technology, it just hasn't been built out and deployed yet.
Yeah I love companies that just put a real human on the phone who knows what they're talking about. All of the problems I'd want a support number for are impossible for an AI to solve, and putting a speaking AI in between me and a real human would just annoy the crap out of me.
Tons of companies have already replaced their actual support chat with AI bots, it's absolutely annoying when you want to get ahold of someone. Some allow you to just ask to get ahold of a person, others don't allow it or have extremely limited hours.
Even if AI has huge impacts on the world, and does a lot of great things, that in no way negates my point.
Right now, almost nobody have an interest in AI chat bots. Even fewer want to have it in SnapChat. And honestly I really don't want an AI bot for customer service, especially at the current stage of tech dev, because the AI bots are completely unreliable and hallucinate and lie regularly. (Which is to say that I heartily doubt your assertion that current AI tech would enable customer service bots that are useful. They produce wonderful prose, but semantics and action are not there, and we don't have training datasets yet to enforce accuracy in prose or action)
So let's say they become useful, great. But today they are still a VR headset, something that's fun to experience for a bit, but which I don't want to be part of my daily experience. It's a novelty, not a useful tool, for nearly everyone out there today.
Make it useful, attractive to most people, and we are in a different regime, and forcing features like this on all your users might be seen as a positive rather than a negative.
I think I’d rather have a clear set of options rather than having something that is going to essentially randomly, uncontrollably respond to what I input. What’s more annoying something that clearly can’t help you, allowing you to move on, or something that will endlessly try to appear helpful while still being manipulative in upselling and avoiding solving my actual problem?
It might be better in some ways, but I don't expect it to be perfect. The AI is likely going to have safety filters and not answer user questions even when they may be safe. Companies may also be incentivized to keep conversations short to keep their token count and therefore bills low. So users will likely not be able to have long conversations.
Imagine every time you call support, instead of having some annoying rules-based automated system, you're having a natural conversation with an AI that is fluent in your language. That's possible with today's technology, it just hasn't been built out and deployed yet.