Should We Be More Polite to AI?

Think Tank #85

This was Dall-E’s response to the prompt “draw your conception of what an AI looks like.” Interesting.

Today, I’d like to share with you a personal anecdote.

I had to contact Substack Support recently because I was having a technical issue (which turned out to be entirely my fault).

When I clicked on the ‘support’ page (something I’ve utilized a while back), I was shocked to find an AI chat bot sitting right at the center of the page. Admittedly, I was annoyed. So Substack has been captured, too, I thought, resigning to the fact that I would be bombarded with the same formulaic answer to my problem several times, only to have to search for the real support email address which may or may not still exist.

As a human, I feel like I’m morally obligated to hate AI, but the more I’m exposed to it, the more difficult this is becoming. This AI chat thing was way quicker (and arguably more competent) than most human customer service representatives I’ve encountered.¹